Re: GSoC project

[Michael Goffioul]

On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 6:11 PM, PhilipNienhuis <address@hidden> wrote:

>> jwe's update said that the dependencies missing in his fork of MXE are
>> ghostscript, pstoedit, fig2dev, and Java. The dependency pstoedit has
>> already been added (see the list of dependencies in my blog update [1]).
>> Should I start my work on adding the remaining of these dependencies?

After glancing through that list I have a few remarks:

- There are a number of  "of-***" dependencies which are octave-forge
packages. Octave is not really depending on those, they're just add-ons.
They do no harm but IMO you can ignore these for the time being, it is very
easy to add more of those later on.

IMO octave forge packages should be part of the final binary. And some packages will introduce additional non-trivial dependencies. It seems that the core of native/MinGW is already done. Though a significant amount of work is left to integrate all forge packages and build everything into a nice installer.

- I've been busy trying to add Java and LLVM in the MXE builds. The
stumbling block is that changing configure options for Octave itself leads
to build errors, maybe related to cross-compiling.
Java had probably best be added once building with MinGW/MXE works natively
on Windows. llvm is already built in MXE but somehow it doesn't get included
in Octave itself.

IMO one should not try to include Java in the binaries. As a user, I'd be upset to see octave binary install its own version of Java instead of using the one already available on the system.

 

>> 2) implement a user-friendly installer for Windows; here my suggestion is

>>> to re-use (and re-engineer) the installer I used to use for my MSVC
>>> binaries
>>>
>>
>> Can you give me some resources of the installer you had used earlier?

In MXE there's already a basic installer (NSIS) built in (see #8051 in the
patch tracker). In Octave-Forge there's an older NSIS build script for the
3.2.4 Octave binary, see:
http://sourceforge.net/p/octave/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/octave-forge/admin/Windows/mingw32/octave.nsi.in

That's funny. The reference above is actually a rip-off my own installer script... :)

> OK it takes up a bit of disk space [1] (should be no big deal these days)
> but it is very convenient for the majority of potential Windows users to
> have this build environment already present in their Octave installation.
> For the developers there's an advantage too: user support, debugging and
> solving problems gets a lot easier if the included build tools are
> standardized.
>
> [1] Today's cross-compiled MXE binary takes up around 500 MB after
> installation in Windows. This includes a build environment sufficiently
> complete for binary octave-forge packages (provided these do not need
> additional dependencies).

Well, if all developers are using the same reasoning, your HDD will quickly get cluttered :). The fact that disk space is cheap these days is not a reason to waste it. As a user, if I already have MSYS installed on my system, I'd rather have octave use it instead of installing its own version. Octave should still be shipped with a stripped down version of MSYS, but its installation should be optional.

Michael.