Check Dependencies First when installing Julia from source

[astrieanna]

Installing Julia from source takes a while. At any point during this first make, it could fail due to an unmet dependency. This is frustrating.

The README does seem to document all the dependencies. However, using it to make sure that you actually have all of them installed takes longer and is more frustrating than running make and interpreting the error message.

Having a script that runs first and checks that I have all the dependencies would be really nice. It would mean that when I walk away and leave it building, I won't come back to find that it got stuck a minute later because of a missing dependency.

[ivarne]

Bump!
This would still be very useful, and its utility will just grow as we get more users. It is frustrating to help users with incompatible gfortran versions, where we usually ask a few unrelated questions before we actually solve the problem.

If the first message when typing make was. "Unsupported version of gfortran, try to upgrade", we and our users would be more happy.

This is a nice "Up for grabs" issue, because it only touches the build system, and there are potentially newcomers with knowledge of build systems that can do this better than any of the core devs.

[StefanKarpinski]

Labelled as "up for grabs".

[vtjnash]

addressed by #9422?

[tkelman]

Not yet, but hopefully as part of

• dependencies

[ViralBShah]

The recent BinaryBuilder work pretty much fixes this.