[Neurodebian-users] matlab-spm8 fails to install due to missing gcc

[Holger Krause]

Am Montag, 25. Juli 2011 schrieb Yaroslav Halchenko:
> Hi Holger,
> 
> thanks for the report
> 
> I guess we should indeed recommend (or even depend) on unversioned gcc
> package as well since now we have only
> 
> Recommends: libstdc++6-4.4-dev | libstdc++-dev
> 
> which should have pulled in the corresponding versioned gcc... what do
> you have for

Hi Yaroslav,

somehow the dependencies currently used aren't satisfactory, at least for 
"older" systems. As I wrote on July 26, on lucid I had to manually install 
unversioned gcc to get matlab-spm8 configured. Therefore I would suggest to 
let matlab-support depend on unversioned gcc directly, at least for lucid. The 
situation might be different for other distributions/releases. 

I also tried an installation of matlab-spm8 on debian lenny.

"aptitude install matlab-support" informs about not installing recommended 
packages: "libstdc++6-4.1-dev libstdc++6-4.2-dev libstdc++6-4.3-dev"

"aptitude install libstdc++6-4.3-dev" installs "binutils{a} g++-4.3{a} 
gcc-4.3{a} libc6-dev{a} libgomp1{a} libstdc++6-4.3-dev linux-libc-dev{a}", but 
no unversioned gcc! So 'aptitude install matlab-spm8' fails, due to
"/usr/bin/matlab-mex: line 305: gcc: command not found"

Only after manually installing unversioned gcc with "aptitude install gcc" 
mex-files of spm8 can be compiled and matlab-spm8 gets properly configured.

To me it looks like matlab-support for lenny should not recommend, but depend 
on some version of libstdc++6-...-dev and also on gcc. (I'm no expert on this 
and I don't know which are the minimal requirements to fullfill these 
dependencies. Can you depend on a virtual package like 'libstdc++-dev'?)

The situation might be better on newer systems, as since debian 6.0 apt by 
default installs also recommended packages (cf. 
<http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-whats-
new.en.html#pkgmgmt>). When I installed matlab-support on debian squeeze its 
recommends pulled in versioned libstdc++6...-dev and gcc-4.4. Still, one has 
to manually install unversioned 'gcc', as '/usr/bin/matlab-mex' won't find the 
compiler otherwise.

I hope this helps to optimize dependencies of matlab-support package.

Best regards,

Holger