Installing Octave Dependencies on CentOS 6 using yum

Question

I am trying to install Octave 4.0.0 (from source) locally in my home directory on a CentOS 6 cluster. This is a rather extensive install (see list of dependencies).

I have several issues :

1. From the documentation it is unclear what versions of the dependencies are necessary. This is a nightmare b/c I find it extremely unlikely for Octave to not depend on the versions of the 20+ dependencies. Is there a way to get this via yum or some other source?

2. I am not a root user, so whenever I try to use the yum utilities to download and install the rpm files it demands root access. I was wondering if there is a way for me to take advantage of yum-builddep (without being root) to do a local install of the dependencies?

3. It appears that yum no longer can find octave. I'm fairly sure that I was able to find it via yum search octave last week. Where can I find old yum repositories?

Answer 1

It appears that yum no longer can find octave. I'm fairly sure that I was able to find it via yum search octave last week. Where can I find old yum repositories?

The octave package is available through the EPEL repository for CentOS. The easiest way to set this up is:

# yum install epel-release

But you can also follow the instructions on the linked web page. Once you have the EPEL repository available:

# yum info octave
Name        : octave
Arch        : x86_64
Epoch       : 6
Version     : 3.4.3
Release     : 1.el6
Size        : 9.1 M
Repo        : epel
Summary     : A high-level language for numerical computations
URL         : http://www.octave.org
License     : GPLv3+

Unfortunately...

I am not a root user, so whenever I try to use the yum utilities to download and install the rpm files it demands root access. I was wondering if there is a way for me to take advantage of yum-builddep (without being root) to do a local install of the dependencies?

I think you're going to be mostly out of luck here. Packaging systems like yum really aren't designed to work when run by an unprivileged user. You could maybe:

repoquery --requires octave |
xargs -iDEP repoquery --whatprovides "DEP" |
sort -u |
grep x86_64 |
xargs yumdownloader

This would download all the dependencies (several of these commands come from the yum-utils package, so that needs to be installed). You would get multiple versions of some packages, so you would want to prune old versions:

repomanage --keep=1 --old . | xargs rm

And now you have all the dependencies. As I said, yum doesn't have any provision for "installing" these as an unprivileged user, but you could unpack them all into a local directory tree using rpm2cpio:

for file in *.rpm; do rpm2cpio $file | cpio -id; done

..but to use this you would need to muck around with compiler flags and possibly even runtime configuration like LD_LIBRARY_PATH.