Packaging on Windows

[Jussi Lehtola]

Hi,


I had a quick look at packaging Octave on Windows. As I mentioned
before, Fedora has a full fledged MinGW build system, that can be used
to compile Windows binaries and installation packages.

It is thus not necessary to use Windows to build the binaries: one can
do the development on a pure linux system. However, one might have to
do tricks to fix the makefiles to compile correctly. For instance, I
get the error 

checking whether i686-pc-mingw32-gfortran generates correct size
integers... ./configure: line 30808: syntax error near unexpected token
`(' ./configure: line 30808: `  $as_echo_n "(cached) " >&6'

when I tried to configure octave 3.4.2-rc1.


Anyway, now to my main point: the first step on the way to a windows
installer would be to define what is wanted from it. I believe that in
the first phase the installer could be quite minimal, i.e. octave and
gnuplot without any support for other packages.

Also, compilation on windows might be easier using another build system
such as CMake. It is used nowadays by quite many projects, since it is
way easier to use than autotools. Since in any case it is probably
necessary to make some kind of build script for windows, I'd suggest
that it be done with CMake - the same scripts can be used on *nix and
Windows.
-- 
Jussi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
address@hidden