Arch Linux User Repository

TODO:

1. Figure out the users and permissions. Currently, /opt/MATLAB/${_release} has 777 permissions, which is obviously undesired. It might be better to create a user group and require users to manually add themselves to it for security reasons.

2. Improve the installer. For example, the current inotify watcher spams stdout and does not account for the end of the download/installation or the width of the terminal, which results in flaky output.

3. Figure out the dependencies. The list of Debian/RHEL dependencies is public, but it includes some seemingly unneeded packages. This might be because they are required by dependent products/add-ons. Additionally, the current logic for removing bundled dependencies should probably be rewritten. Maintaining an exhaustive list for a single release is very difficult, and these components change without notice. Moreover, the current approach may go against the Arch KISS philosophy. Ideally, we should remove only the problematic components like Qt, XCB, libtiff, gcc-libs, fontconfig, etc.

4. Add auto-discovery for packages written for MATLAB. My plan was to use /usr/lib/MATLAB/${_release} for release-specific modules and /usr/lib/MATLAB/common for shared (mostly architecture-independent) packages. However, load order matters, and "common" modules need to specify which releases they are compatible with. This means we need to implement our own logic for discovering and loading these, likely via hooks, shell scripts, and configuration files (perhaps TOML could work?).

5. Fix the Python components. python-matlabengine does install the Python components built against the version of Python shipped by Arch. However, some proprietary CPython components are not included and are built against ancient Python versions. This likely requires version spoofing or some alternative approach.

6. Write and upload packages for previous MATLAB releases. It is entirely possible to have multiple releases installed simultaneously. I have a few of these packages myself, but they are drafts and not suitable for upload to the AUR.

7. Write and upload packages for MATLAB-dependent add-ons and products. When installing MATLAB required user intervention for source access, it was acceptable to break reproducibility and manually specify required products for installation. Now that we use MPM, it would be better to separate products into individual packages. These packages would install themselves and their dependencies into a specific location, then use appdata to install only the component's files. The problem is that MATLAB often includes conflicting files that need to be combined or overwritten. Obviously, we can't allow that, so a hook must be implemented to, for example, combine *.combine@matlab-simulink and replace *.replace@matlab-documentation files with backups. Needless to say, this is challenging to implement, so the previous approach (having users specify the product list) might still be preferred.

8. Write and upload the matlab-runtime package. I have a draft, but the problem with this package is that it installs the runtime for every available product. Ideally, for source-built packages, we would want to makedepend on matlab-$product and depend on matlab-$product-runtime. However, this is not possible without splitting the runtime packages, which poses the challenges described above. I’ll try my best to revisit this sometime later.

@aoneko, @Reexys, please read the post-installation instructions. If you've lost them, you can find the same information here.

Anyone wants to take over the package? I don't use Arch anymore. Please email me so we can discuss; as I want to hand over this package to someone who knows what they are doing.

@kyak Thank you, this solved the issue. Perhaps the package maintainer should add this as a dependency as well

@kruzah install libxcrypt-compat from aur

MATLAB longer works after a soname update on libcrypt.so/libxcrypt:

/opt/tmw/MATLAB-r2020b/bin/glnxa64/MATLAB: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Please note that you may need to extract/unpack the installer with unzip instead of some GUI utilities (e.g. Ark), or some symbol links or so would be missing, and you will get such error messages when running ./install:

/tmp/matlab-instlaller/bin/glnxa64/MathWorksProductInstaller: error while loading shared libraries: /tmp/matlab-instlaller/bin/glnxa64/libicudata.so.69: file too short

I followed the instruction in https://github.com/Victrid/matlab-aur, everything went find until the "makepkg -s". When I executed this command, It always stop at

Starting build()... ERROR: A failure occured in build(). Aborting...

Any suggestions? (fyi, my source is matlab 2020b)

@tornado99 what type of instructions do you want? If you don't want to compile gcc8 on every machine, just compile it once and then install it on all the machines. If you want to run MATLAB without a compiler, just remove gcc8 as a dependency.

There should be clear instructions for those who want to disable GCC from the pkgbuild. I just install Matlab from their installer on most of my machines as I can't afford to lock up a machine for 1/2 a day compiling GCC. In fact if you wanted to run MATLAB on a low-end machine you could be waiting several days for the GCC part to finish.

@bbaserdem ./install from r2021b iso works fine for me

@VictriD; what you have is amazing; i do want to add it to the script.

@all; i can't make matlab installer (2021b) run on my PC; does anyone have any issues with it?