More on MinGW build

[John W. Eaton]

On 27-Jan-2011, J Luis wrote:

| I would really love to be able to build Octave under windows and even
| much more if that could be done entirely with VS or Inter compiler.

You are free to use other compilers if you like, but the build system
will require a Unixy shell environment.  There is simply no way we are
going to maintain VS project files (or whatever they are called) in
addition to the build system we currently have.

Cygwin or Msys should work to provide the Unixy environment.  It's
unfortunate that Msys+MinGW is not easier to install.  I guess the
problem is the same one we face with building Octave for Windows.
There just aren't enough interested and competent people around who
are willing to spend the time to do the work.

Even if you choose to build with the MinGW compiler, can't you do that
when using Cygwin to host the build environment?  The last time I
tried, Cygwin was pretty straightforward to install.  You migth also
look at the mingw-64 project, as that seems to have recent GCC
versions and I think versions that are built to run in Cygwin bug
produce binaries for Windows (without Cygwin).  Building this way may
require some form of cross compiling (to avoid having the configure
script think that it is building Octave for Cygwin) but I'm willing to
help with that as ultimately I'd like to be able to cross compile
Octave for Windows on a GNU/Linux system.

Also, with MSVC, you can't legally distribute the resulting binaries
due to licensing restrictions.  I don't know whether there are similar
problems with the Intel compilers.

| I'm part of the GMT team and we are aiming to have all GMT5 programs
| to run as mexs on both Matlab and Octave.
| I don't know if you guys know GMT (http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/gmt/)
| but it gives a lot of the functionalities of the ML Mapping Toolbox
| (and MUCH faster). And with it, it comes the possibility to use
| another very popular library in the GIS comunity - GDAL.

That would be great, as I think it makes a lot more sense to have free
software tools not depending on proprietary ones.

| But to think
| that I will have to build all dependencies with the messy mingw is not
| really motivating for me.

Are you trying to say that we are somehow responsible for that?

jwe