On Sun, 27 May 2007, Gordon Hughes wrote:
As a newcomer, I apologise if this e-mail raises an issue that
has been settled in the past. My query or suggestion concerns
the possibility of providing a statically linked version of
gretl for Linux. [The Windows & Mac versions are necessarily
statically linked because it cannot be assumed that users have
the necessary dlls.] The query is prompted by two
considerations...
In fact, the Windows and Mac versions are not statically linked --
what happens is that the gretl binaries are distributed in a big
package that includes all the necessary shared libraries (or at
least, all the libraries that are in any way non-standard).
I have thought about trying to do this for Linux too, but I think
a better way would be to make a determined effort to overcome the
remaining problems with certain libraries, in particular
lapack/blas and libpng. I've heard of several people having
problems with undefined symbols relating to the fortran library
when linking to lapack. I'm also aware of issues with libpng (a
very useful library which is unfortunately a horrid mess in regard
to its versioning). It _should_ be possible to work around these
things. (Though I'm not ruling out the other approach if it's
really needed.)
Even popular distributions such as Ubuntu and SimplyMEPIS have
libraries that are not compatible with the most recent versions
of gretl...
Hmm, I've been able to build gretl on Ubuntu 6.10 and 7.04 without
doing anything fancy (just installing the runtime and devel
packages for everything that's needed).
B. Just yesterday, I encountered a different version of the
same problem. I have decided to use Suse Linux for my main
systems - in particular Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop
(SLED) which is generally compatible with OpenSuse 10.1 & 10.2.
I tried to install gretl 1.6.5 and failed because it could not
resolve the dependency for libpng12.so.0 (a PNG graphics
library).
Do you mean you tried building gretl, or using the rpm from the
gretl website?
Allin.