I reimplemented my changes to make it possible to compile the GUI without the need to install octave, that means it links libraries and includes files directly in the source tree. However, I strongly suppose this will break the build on MacOSX and Windows, please be patient here and help me fixing/testing this. Another drawback is that the library path and other environmental things will be wrong: I was able to start the GUI from QtCreator, but 'feval' was reported as unimplemented as long as you don't have octave installed. I guess you need to have a similar thing like run-octave.sh for the GUI (or modify that file so it runs the GUI). I tried to add that, but gave up. Autotools didn't want to turn my
run-octave-gui.sh.in into run-octave-gui.sh, no matter where I added stuff to the autotools files. In the end, I decided to not touch these files to not break more.
This is a first step into integrating with autotools. Probably, if we can make autotools call qmake during the configure step to generate makefiles and tell autotools to invoke these during make, we're not that far away from integrating the build system.