I REPEAT: maxima can not be built, because gnuplot fails on download

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Oct 21), Henry Olyer said:
> Take a hard-drive you can write on, burn a copy of FBSD 7.2 onto a CD, and
> do the basic install.  Then, when the base system is up, run sysinstall
> and do a "Configure" followed by "Packages".  Then go to "math" and select
> maxima.
> 
> Then watch.
> 
> Gnuplot, a dependency of maxima will fail.  And thus without using the
> "-f" flag (as part of a PKG_ADD command,) you can not load a recent copy
> of Maxima on FreeBSD.
>
> This is the case not only for 7.2, but it's been true since at least
> version 6.1
> 
> And Gnuplot seems to be missing something called PDFlib -- it may have
> been redacted by someone who decided that it wasn't supposed to be public,
> I don't know.  But notice I am describing two problems.  One, an install
> of Maxima fails using the package method, because Gnuplot doesn't install,
> and also, using the ports tree, (see, I'm not talking about a package
> anymore;) gnuplot fails to install because the PDFlib ports support file
> can not be found.

I haven't had any problems building gnuplot or pdflib from source (and I
haven't seen any complaints on the ports list either).  You'll need to
provide your error messages before we can help you with that.

As for the maxima package install problem, gnuplot depends on pdflib, which
is an optional component.  pdflib has licensing restrictions that prevent a
binary package from being created.  There are a couple hundred ports like
this, where they will build fine from ports but you aren't allowed to ship
the binary.

The gnuplot port should probably turn the pdflib option off when building
packages for distribution (similar to how the audio/grip or audio/sox ports
handle their dependency on audio/lame).  If you build the pdflib port
yourself, or build the gnuplot port and turn off the PDF option, then you'll
be able to install the maxima package.  It won't try and install things that
are already on the system.

> Oddly, the package install failure, while it names gnuplot, doesn't
> correctly identify the problem.  On several systems on which I've tried to
> do the maxima install, the error message identifies the problem as an I/O
> error.  Only when I attempt the ports-install does the problem show up
> correctly, that gnuplot depends on PDFlib, which can not be found.
> 
> Obviously I run maxima without gnuplot graphics.  I just had to learn the
> work-around, not a big deal...
> 
> I look at it this way...  For me, getting maxima up on FreeBSD has taught
> me a lot about how FBSD is organized.  But really, someone should take the
> time to make this a solved problem.  I can make gnuplot work, but I don't
> have the authority to change the package content.
> 
> A similar problem exists with clusterit.  Most of the commands work just
> fine.  But the semaphore control, (called "guards" in clusterit,) don't
> lock.  They simply don't.  The program probably works fine in Linux.  But
> myself and a friend, who have about 85 years of programming experience
> couldn't make it work.  We scrapped it and wrote our own tool to do this.

If you can provide more detail, file a PR or post to the freebsd-ports
mailing list and see if anyone else has seen the problem.
 
> I love FreeBSD and I continue to be very impressed with the quality of
> this OS, not just the core, not just the documentation, not just the
> applications, simply, it is truly a remarkable 'product'.  The people who
> have contributed to making this work should know that they have really
> contributed.
> 
> And I use FBSD heavily -- in fact I and a couple of friends put together a
> cluster of machines and we never saw any other OS as a good choice.  These
> two problems are all I have; So you see, I'm not unhappy.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com