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Cross compiling GNU Octave from GNU/Linux for Windows


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: Cross compiling GNU Octave from GNU/Linux for Windows
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:18:24 -0400

On 21-Oct-2011, Martin Helm wrote:

| After I succeeded some time ago to compile octave with mingw on windows
| (3.4.3 and development version) it turned out that I really do not like
| to do that since almost everything I do is done on GNU/Linux systems
| (most of the time on openSUSE, sometimes on Debian) esp. if it comes to
| development.
| 
| So the natural question was, why not cross compiling it.

Yes, I also want to do this and tried recently.

| I started a few
| days ago to make myself a bit familiar with the mingw cross compiler
| environment (did this on openSUSE) and were able to cross compile some
| libraries from scratch and also octave.

I did not get very far, as I think most of Octave's dependencies are
not very well designed for cross compiling.  My conclusion was that if
I could just get all the dependencies built with MinGW, then I would
put them in a place where the cross build of Octave could find them,
then focus on the cross build of Octave and worry about cross building
the dependencies later.

| Since I noticed the configure script created by autogen.sh is not very
| suitable for this, it was necessary to do some ugly (and dirty) hacks to
| make this possible.

I think the only real problems are that the configure script has some
tests that require running programs.  Rather than try to run them
(perhaps with wine?) it would be best to try to provide defaults for
cross compiling where needed.  The AC_RUN_IFELSE macro allows for
this, but Octave's configure script just doesn't set a default often,
and even then, the default really should depend in some way on the
value of the host variable that is set when running configure for the
cross build.

| If there is any interest at all in that I will summarize the problems I
| found (and the hacks I applied) during this weekend for further
| discussion to find a better and clean way to support that.

Yes, I'd be interested in helping you with this project.`

jwe


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