Building Octave

[mwoodruff]

After a few years in the real world, I'm going back to university in the fall, and I'm going to need Octave.  I tried building it from source, which is something I've done with relatively little pain for other applications.  I'm not going to go into my specific problems here, since those don't have much to do with Tiny Core Linux, but suffice it to say that building Octave is a huge headache. Anyway, I figured I'd ask:

(1) Has anybody successfully built Octave under Tiny Core?  Maybe you can tell me what I'm doing wrong

(2) Octave has been accumulating crud for about 20 years, has a million source files written in three different languages, and it wants to link against everything under the sun.  Has anybody built a similarly bloated package with success?  Any guidance?  Is it foolhardy even to attempt it?

(3) Is it possible that binaries built for another Linux distribution would work under Tiny Core?  Would I just be setting myself up for trouble with dependencies if I tried? 

[althalus]

(2) Octave has been accumulating crud for about 20 years, has a million source files written in three different languages, and it wants to link against everything under the sun.  Has anybody built a similarly bloated package with success?  Any guidance?  Is it foolhardy even to attempt it?

If the application is as bloated as you say, it may be that you'll need to build any number of missing dependancies that aren't in the repo. Pay good attention to what files it complains are missing, then make good use of the "Provides" feature in the app browser to find appropriate dev packages.

There have been instances where I've only wanted to compile one application, and have ended up making 8 different extensions just to support it. I'm sure others have had similar or worse dependancy chains to sort through.

(3) Is it possible that binaries built for another Linux distribution would work under Tiny Core?  Would I just be setting myself up for trouble with dependencies if I tried? 
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Possible, yes, but chances are there will be at least one file in a different place, and the other distro's build won't be able to handle that small difference. (I use the nightly build-bot testing binaries for Chromium)