Re: Patches to enable MSVC compilation

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Dec-2009, Michael Goffioul wrote:

| I don't think it make sense to continue submitting patches to
| maintain MSVC compatibility.

It's not like we are rejected every portability patch.  So I think it
does make sense to continue submitting them so as to minimize the
number of external patches you would have to maintain.

I also don't see any reason not to put the required patches in a
public place.  As I recall, there is nothing preventing people from
building Octave with MSVC.  The problem is that we can't provide a
binary distribution compiled with MSVC and linked with MSVC run-time
libraries without violating the terms of the GPL.  But I have no
objection to making it possible (and even relatively easy) for people
to compile Octave with MSVC.  But there are limits, so if there is
something that causes a lot of trouble for Octave maintenance, or
would mean worse performance for all Octave users, then I'd rather not
make the change, or at least it should be conditional in some way.

I haven't looked closely at the patch, but would it be possible to
have a conditional that allows us to integrate your changes to avoid
the MSVC bug, but only for MSVC?

jwe