Re: Mingw32 compiled binaries

[David Bateman]

Michael Goffioul wrote:
> On 6/6/07, Benjamin Lindner <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Would it be of general interest to provide also (official) compiled
>> octave packages to be used with the mingw32 compiler?
>> This way one could also provide a packaged mingw compiler seperately
>> or bundled with octave. It is also (to me) more appealing in terms
>> of licensing (there was some discussion on msvc runtime libraries on
>> this list I recall)
> 
> It's especially appealing due to the fact that you can include the compiler
> in the package, which is not possible with MSVC. I guess that you can
> re-use a large part of the NSI scripts I wrote for the MSVC-based package.
> It'd be also interesting to do some benchmarking.
> 
> Michael.
> 

Yes I agree, and hope as much as possible of the MSVC build could be
re-used. I would really like to see a MinGW binary as well for exactly
the reason Michael mentions. IE. You can include the compilers..

One of the big issue I had with a mingw binary when I was building them
a couple of years back was the Atlas libraries (I couldn't build them
under vmware) and the ginac/cln dependencies of the symbolic package. In
fact getting all of the dependencies built is as big an issue (if not
bigger) than building Octave itself. I believe that the Altas 3.7.33 is
almost a release candidate for 3.8.0 and that it includes a build
process for particular architectures, and so might be easier to build
than the 3.6.0 atlas was.

The additional questions I'd ask are

* Do you have a build script for Octave and all its dependencies? I have
one that is almost two years old now so is very out of date
* Do you have an installer? Probably NSIS based?
* Is there someway to use Michael's build process for MinGW as well? In
fact could the build process be made compatible with both?
* Are you willing to support the continued building of mingw binaries?
The person who built the last cygwin binary on octave-forge did it once
then disappeared. However, if the MSVC build process might be shared
between MSVC and MinGW then this might be less of an issue.

Looking at Michael's notes in octave-forge/admin/Windows/msvc I don't
think he has an automatic build process for all of Octave and its
dependencies, though it appears he does for octave-forge. Correct me if
I'm wrong Michael... In any case Michael, if you can give a quick
tutorial of your full build process that would be helpful to a number of
people..

Regards
David