Building snapshot versions for Windows

[Clemens Buchacher]

Hi,

(Apologies for duplicates, I was not subscribed.)

I would like to use Octave on my Windows machine at work. Getting there
turns out to be quite some effort, as described below. Please advise if
I have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Currently, the main thing keeping me from using Octave is this bug:

 https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=37122

As John pointed out to me, even though Rik fixed the bug within a month
of the original report, 9 months later there is no Windows binary
available which actually contains the fix. Maybe that fix should have
been applied to the stable branch?

However, even if it had made it into stable, there is quite a bit of
delay until a new version is released and built for Windows. For my
purposes, I think it would be better to use snapshot versions from the
default branch, at least for testing. I will have to test the classdef
branch as well. Currently I am not allowing the use of classdef because
Octave does not yet support it. But classdef is strongly preferred and
it is getting difficult to argue for Octave compatibility while we
cannot even use it due to the above...

So I am trying to do that. But there seem to be many different ways to
install and build Octave for Windows. Some are described here [1],
others I found somewhere in the source tree, but the instructions are
confusing and do not inspire confidence in their accuracy. I see also
the recent discussion of MXE builds, which seems promising. Is this the
one I should be aiming for?

I managed to complete the build by applying the attached patch to
mxe-octave. I had to upgrade to gcc 4.8.0, because gcc 4.7.2 does not
build with texinfo 5.0, which is the current version installed by Arch
Linux. Backporting the fix needed to 4.7.2 is a much larger patch than
the one needed to get gcc 4.8.0 to build with mxe-octave. But gcc 4.8.0
currently breaks C++ mex files [2], so you may want to wait until that
bug is fixed.

Unfortunately, I can only test the Windows build at work, since I do not
have any Windows machines at home. How do you guys test your Windows
builds?

Cheers,
Clemens

[1] http://wiki.octave.org/Octave_for_Windows
[2] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=38746

mxe-octave-gcc-4.8.0.patch
Description: Text document