Re: Failed to build package build-m4

[Sascha Suessspeck]

Thanks again, John. Yes, I meant to write autoconf. Sorry about that.

When I enter the ./configure command with the extensions as suggested in your email below, I get an error message from bsdtar.exe - Unable To Locate Component i.e. 'This application has failed to start because msys-lzma-1.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.' I noticed that the dll related to msys-liblzma 5.0.3 and bin msys-bsdtar version 2.8.3 were installed with MinGW and that the similar file 'msys-lzma-5.dll' is located in the msys\1.0\bin folder.

On 8 December 2016 at 22:34, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:

On 12/08/2016 02:30 PM, Sascha Suessspeck wrote:

Greetings John,

Thanks for your reply. To answer your first question, I downloaded a
zip-file from http://hg.octave.org/mxe-octave/ and hit 'autoconfig'

Do you mean autoconf?

> in the command prompt while running MINGW32 shell in the background,

I don't know what you mean by "in the background" in this context.  I suspect there is some confusion here about the terms that you are using.

> then './configure', then 'make zip-dist'.

Yes, I did all this on a Windows system. I did try the alternative
building Octave natively for Windows, on a Windows system. I ran
'./configure' in the folder of the patched Octave source code (v4.2.0)
and stumbled over the PCRE library and header files that need to be
installed. I downloaded and installed (./configure) PCRE, and placed a
copy of the pcre folder and related files in the C:\MinGW\include and
other folders. However, I could not locate the required pcre_compile
file anywhere and am stuck.

If you are using mxe-octave to build Octave for Windows on a Windows system, then you are doing a native build.  A cross-build means you are building for a different OS than the one where the build is running. I.e., you are building Octave for Windows while doing the build on a Linux system.

I think you need to use the following options for the configure step:

  ./configuire --enable-native-build

You may also want to use the options

  --enable-binary-packages
  --enable-devel-tools
  --enable-octave=stable

jwe