>> But doesn't GPL require you to eventually provide
>> complete source code & build tools for ALL binaries you distribute
>> (i.e. including the numeric libraries)? Probaby as a sepreate 'devel'
>> package so that the user who wants to build oct files can install it?
>
> Yes the GPL does require that the source is available in its preferred
> form and so yes we are supposed to supply the means to down the source
> of the GPL components used in the build somewhere. MSVC is a bit
> esoteric in terms of its support for most of the libraries used in a
> build of octave and so just giving the source and any patches needed for
> a MSVC build should be sufficient. I believe Michael wants to put his
> build scripts in octave-forge, however officially we still need to
> supply a download of the GPL sources... The cygwin installer on
> octave-forge at the moment doesn't meet this condition, although the
> cygwin environment itself supplies this.
>
> It seems to me a lot of work to do to support this GPL requirement with
> a download, so I'd recommend taking the route of a written offer to
> supply the source code for the octave-forge supplied binaries on
> request, and try and convince the users to go and get the code itself
> elsewhere and just use Michael build scripts with this.
My intention is of course to comply with the licenses of the various
support libs. Most of them, but not all, are GPL. In general, I send my
changes to the maintainers in order to integrate them in the main source
tree, but as most support libs are UNIX-oriented, I fear that these guys
will be somewhat "hermetic" to changes related to Win32/MSVC
(aka evil-OS/evil-compiler). The use of "cc-msvc" reduces a lot the
changes to be made, but still...
My idea was to put somewhere (in octave-forge, for instance) all that
is required to re-build the complete thing, as I do. This means the
compile tools (like cc-msvc), but also for each support lib, a patch
and a howto explaining how I compile the library under MSVC
(which is sometimes quite tricky). For the GPL packages, I guess
we'd also need to provide the original source package (on request,
for instance, because they are available on the web anyway).