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.

@TheHardew @AlexBocken fixed now, thanks. Can't say how it worked without issues until few weeks ago haha.

I had the same issue as @TheHardew, his proposed fix in line 207 fixed the installation for me.

@Rubo thank you so much for your work on updating this PKGBUILD!

I think it should be ls -d at line 207 in "Changing around locations if spoofing is needed..."? I got errors without it:
mv: cannot stat 'dependency_links.txt'$'\n''PKG-INFO'$'\n''SOURCES.txt'$'\n''top_level.txt': No such file or directory

@rellieberman the MATLAB installer will not care, but you will likely run into problems with pacman if you either try and reinstall the current version or upgrade the package to a new version.

Hi all, and thanks for all the amazing work! I have a question, if I want to add more packages after a partial install, do I have to redo the whole installation? is there a way to just add the new packages I need? Thanks

Thanks for all the great work! Sadly I am stuck with the same log as this comment. I have downloaded the latest PKGBUILD 'pkgrel=5', 'pkgver=9.12.0.1903524' and Matlab <version>9.12.0.1927505</version> which sets pkgrel and pkgver correctly. Still building gets stuck at the non-existent folder ${srcdir}/build/extern/engines/python. Do you have any guidance for me?

Thanks for the update, partial install works now.

@sukanka thank you, I left a comment on your pull request and I have enabled the Issues tab. I don't know why it was disabled.

@Rubo, I ran namcap for the built package to check dependencies, and here is the output. https://fars.ee/53NB

Dependencies should be updated according to the output. Some are in depends and some should go into optdepends (for example java-runtime) and some should be removed(libselinux)

BTW, I cannot open an issue in that github repo.

@sukanka I'm glad to hear you built it successfully. As mentioned in this comment, there is a repo here. I guess the choice of links being grey near black text is a little unfortunate...