imread failure in octave as installed by macports

[joshmoz@…]

It's not possible to use the "imread" function in octave as installed by MacPorts because of a bug in graphicsmagick. The problem and the solution is outlined in this mailing list entry:

​https://mailman.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/help-octave/2011-March/044937.html

This is a pretty important piece of functionality for octave, would be great to have it fixed.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

So, the port that needs a patch is octave, right? Not GraphicsMagick?

Try the octave-devel port instead. The octave port is very old and really needs to be updated.

[joshmoz@…]

I believe, from reading at the link I left in the summary, that the patch needs to be in graphicsmagick. The bug shows up to me when I'm using octave, which uses graphicsmagick, but the solution is to fix imagemagick (or so it seems).

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to joshmoz@…:

I believe, from reading at the link I left in the summary, that the patch needs to be in graphicsmagick.

The link in the summary references three links:

​http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?29474

This bug report says the problem should be fixed as of Octave 3.4.x and GraphicsMagick 1.3.13. The GraphicsMagick port is at version 1.3.18 so it should contain the fix. The octave port is at version 3.2.4 and therefore presumably doesn't contain the fix, which is why I suggested using the octave-devel port which is at version 3.6.4.

​https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/graphicsmagick/+bug/636021

This seems to be a bug report about a software package called "drawtiming", the fix for which was to patch the drawtiming package. I'm not familiar with that software package, and "port search drawtiming" doesn't show any such port in MacPorts.

​https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=655569

This bug report against Red Hat Fedora 14 seems to be the same Octave 3.2.4 / GraphicsMagick 1.3.12 incompatibility, which was closed as wontfix because Fedora 14 reached end of life.

[michaelld (Michael Dickens)]

Please do:

sudo port clean octave
sudo port selfupdate

and then try installing octave again. Should be fixed with r114034 with octave being at 3.6.4.