Re: Successful compilation with MinGW

[David Bateman]

Yes John dropped glob/fnmatch as they are in libc on almost every system 
and felt no need to keep them just for MinGW. I equally took them from 
the latest glibc and compiled them separately for octave. I'll 
distribute it as a separate library beside octave/mingw when I do a release.

I have a version with all of the dependencies except ATLAS (can't build 
ATLAS under mingw, need cygwin/mingw and then can't do it under vmware 
since the cache size can't be detected) and all of octave-forge except 
the symbolic toolbox as CLN uses fancy templates that g++ under mingw 
doesn't like. For the ATLAS issue, I've in fact linked octave against an 
external version of lapack and blas, with the idea that I can post-hoc 
replace them with ATLAS versions. ATLAS is a bastard mix of blas and a 
few lapack  functions and so I'll need to split the ATLAS build up and 
recreate compatible blas/lapack libraries to my current external 
versions, but this is down fairly often under Linux and is therefore a 
known solution. As for CLN, I think we'll be doing without at least at 
the outset.

I have every intention of doing an NSIS installer of octave/mingw in the 
near future, but needed several points resolved

1) I wanted to release a version against a full release of octave and 
octave-forge. I didn't want to do it against a CVS version as or a 
version that was heavily patched as this meant that it is unclear what 
version of the code a mingw user was using when reporting bugs.
2) Need an octave-forge release with the autoload to replace the 
symbolic links (mingw doesn't have sym links and copies the file 
instead) since as you notice octave is very large mainly due to multiple 
copies of the same file. This just when in to octave-forge and so the 
next release of octave-forge in the very near future together with a 
2.9.5 release of octave and these two conditions will be met
3) I need to learn how to use NSIS as I've never built a windows 
installer package..
4) Need to strip out some of the development libraries and headers to 
make the package a reasonable size.
5) I need more hours in my day than I currently have...

There are lots of little issues that you might not have noticed yet. The 
main one being DON'T use the msys rxvt to run octave in. This terminal 
is badly broken and readline completely messes up in an msys rxvt. Your 
options are then a cygwin rxvt, which kind of misses the point of doing 
a mingw build of octave in the first place, or use the dos cmd.exe 
terminal, which is what I'm currently doing, though you'll loose the 
capability to cut and paste. My thoughts were that this mingw release of 
octave is a temporary measure and what is really wanted under windows is 
a full IDE, and it that case it'll supply its own terminal capabilities 
to integrate with octave. Sorry but it won't be me to write such an IDE 
though, I don't even use windows, but recognize that octave needs a 
windows native version of to get proper acceptance in the windows world.

Cheers
David