status on mingw32 build of octave

[Benjamin Lindner]

Hi everybody,

I have been 4 weeks out of the country so I have been very silent 
regarding the mingw32 builds. Now I wanted to give a short status update.
I'm a bit lagging behind with the mailing list, so I'm still working on 2.9.12. 
I've just seen that there has been a 2.9.13 release.
For the 2.9.12 mingw32 build:
I put together a more-or-less consistent build environment for the 
dependency libraries and octave itself and built a working 2.9.12 binary.
I also checked with the package manager pkg.m, and it works in principle.
One problem however I came across is the fact, that the configure scripts 
(if present) of the forge packages no NOT respect the configure flags 
stored in mkoctfile/octave_confg_info, especially the include directories 
and library directories. This leads to the configure script not finding
e.g. GSL or PNG/JPEG libraries and headers, whereas a compilation of the
.oct files with mkoctfile works perfectly. 
This currently affects the GSL and IMAGE package, and I guess will affect 
any other package depending on an external library.
I don't know how to fix this the best way.
My first attempt would be to fix the configure scripts, but this I don't
know how to manage. 
I thought of hacking the pkg.m functions, but this is actually the wrong
place to fix, since it's not an error in the package manager.
So I tricked a bit and pre-set GCC's environment variables in order that
the configure script will find the dependencies. not very elegant, but a 
quick fix.
Any better ideas on this?

I personally am not a fan of prereleases, so I haven't made any 
available yet, but the setup is progressing into a stage where a first 
release would seem fit.
So I am now thinking of how and where to do it.
If this should develop in a "official" binary distribution of octave, then
should it be available along with octave or octave-forge?
I was also thinking of creating a sourceforge project, let's say 
octave-mingw32, providing the binaries, the build scripts&patches and 
also the sources for the dependencies (for GPL conformance).
One could also make it available via the octave-forge SF project.
What's the experts' optinon on that?

I am also following a bit the develpoment on the mingw32 project and 
it seems that a 4.2 and/or 4.1 version of gcc is now emerging.
This would also be of interest for reasons of speed and a (hopefully) 
dynamically linked stdc++ lib (the current .oct binaries are quite large 
in size compared to the msvc built ones...).

One item that is also on my to-do list is the topic of relocatable 
packages - I opened that topic once quickly but have not followed up
since I wanted to have a nice building environment first. I feel
that without this feature something is missing about a binary release.

benjamin


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