Re: Octave with non-gcc compilers and build testing

[Paul Kienzle]

John W. Eaton wrote:

> Paul reports that he is also close to being able to build Octave on
> SGI systems with the SGI compiler, at least after creating some
> header files to wrap the C headers for C++.
It does build and pass make check, but not quite out of the box.  The 
new version of the
CC compiler (7.5?) is apparently mostly compliant, so I won't even need 
to fake cmath, etc.
We haven't got it yet.

> The main problem I see with the tinderbox idea is that we need to have
> some poeple donate cycles.  We don't need anything fast, but we do
> need some variety.  Currently, I can only offer to set up testing on
> Debian x86 and Alpha systems, and perhaps a Sun system (though the
> hardware is not mine, so I'm not sure I will be able to get away with
> running compile jobs 24/7 on the machines I have access to).  So is
> there any interest in helping to set somethign like this up and make
> it work?
Daily builds seem a little excessive.  Maybe weekly?  It would also be 
nice if you could trigger
it yourself when you want to release a new version.

It might also be nice if 3rd party packages could build and test. 
Currently that's octave-forge,
but I can see there may be others in the future, once we've got a 
Comprehensive Octave
Archive Network up and running.  One problem with octave-forge stuff is 
that it may depend
on libraries such as qhull which may or may not be present. Testing 
octave-forge/main/parallel
will be even more of a challenge. :-)

For those of us behind firewalls, it will have to be a pull system. 
E.g., a cron job which checks
every 6 hours if  the version mentioned in 
http://www.octave.org/buildcheck is newer than the last
version built on your machine.  If so, then download, configure, make, 
make check and post
a reply form to http://www.octave.org/buildresults.  This sounds easy 
enough to do, but I don't
have the php skills to do it.

Paul Kienzle
address@hidden