Building Octave without qt: what features are not available?

help
#1

I was wondering “what if there is no qt available”, what would be disabled/unavailable?

I guess that:

  • no gui support
  • only gnuplot and fltk as graphics toolkit (fltk will be deprecated, right?)

what else would not be available or disabled?

I’m considering the case where octave is built from source.

kind regards
Leonardo

#2

Your guess is to my knowledge the answer to your question. Despite the GUI, Octave has little dependence on qt. All mathematical or input/output libraries are independent of qt.

To verify this, I had a look at the HAVE_QT build macros, which are guarding code depending on qt on the Octave 6 stable branch (some .hg and cache files are stripped from the output):

$ grep -R -l HAVE_QT

libgui/graphics/GLCanvas.h
libgui/graphics/Table.cc
libgui/graphics/GLCanvas.cc
libgui/qterminal/libqterminal/QTerminal.cc
libgui/src/m-editor/file-editor.cc
libgui/src/m-editor/octave-qscintilla.cc
libgui/src/files-dock-widget.cc
libgui/src/tab-bar.cc
libgui/src/graphics-init.cc
libgui/src/octave-qobject.cc
libgui/src/documentation.cc

libinterp/corefcn/graphics.cc

scripts/plot/util/graphics_toolkit.m
scripts/plot/util/__opengl_info__.m
scripts/plot/util/allchild.m
scripts/image/getframe.m
scripts/gui/uimenu.m

doc/interpreter/module.mk
doc/doxyhtml/Doxyfile.in

m4/acinclude.m4
configure
Makefile.in
config.in.h
#3

Thanks!

I asked that not only for curiosity, but also considering situations where qt tools/libs are not available (system with low resources, old qt version, qt tools not in the repos, etc…).

#4

Hi,

I regularly build Octave without QT and it works fine for me.

pocker
February 10
I was wondering “what if there is no qt available”, what would be disabled/unavailable?

I guess that:

• no gui support
• only gnuplot and fltk as graphics toolkit (fltk will be deprecated, right?)
what else would not be available or disabled?

Nothing else, as far as I can tell.

I’m considering the case where octave is built from source.

kind regards
Leonardo

Hope this helps,
c.

#5

Without Qt won’t be able to print with the -svgconvert option that brings a few improvements for vector formats (support non ascii characters, transparency).