The ironic thing is that all this used to work on my Mac, but Apple no longer supports 10.5.8, so I was forced to update to Snow Leopard, 10.6. And everything broke (thank you Apple).
On the surface, it seems simple. Build an open source package like octave under Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6)
Apple has made this difficult, to say the least. They no longer download XCode for older operating systems unless you are a paid developer. My Macbook pro 2.16Ghz cannot load Lion, so that option is not available.
My old fink doesn't work because it was old. In order to build a new one, I need Xcode 3.2, which I can't get (see above).
I downloaded a free gcc 4.2, and it works fine.
So in order to try to build octave, it's the old style gnu install:
./configure make make install
./configure fails because there is no fortran installed. That's a special case because the install of gcc didn't include fortran. So a fallback would be building a complete gcc which I have done in the past.
downloaded gcc 4.9:
gcc-4.9-20130728 inside, gcc49
gcc can't build because it needs the three subsidiary packages gmp, mpfr and mpc
I am now trying to build these, so that I can bootstrap a complete gcc build, but in the meantime, is there any simpler way to bootstrap these things? I find it hard to understand why no binaries are available for:
fink octave
which would solve part of my current problems.
You can still get XCode. You just have to be registered on Apple Developer, but you do not have to pay for the license. You then download it through the Mac App store, or you can get a link that opens it in the App store here. Finally, you have to install the command line tools from within Xcode. These can be found under the Components tab of the Download Preferences panel.
Let me know if that does not help. My iMac running 10.6 is currently in for repairs, so I am on my 10.7 laptop and cannot test all the specifics yet.