Packaging Octave for Windows and OS X (was: writing integer with fwrite)

[John W. Eaton]

On 14-Dec-2004, Andy Adler <address@hidden> wrote:

| - The compiler problem. gcc-3.3 produces slow code, and gcc-3.2
|   is hard to get, and doesn't compile octave properly any more

My understanding is that this is due to the way exception handling is
implemented in GCC 3.3 for Cygwin.  Does anyone know whether this is
likely to improve any time soon?  Long term, we need to support
improving the compiler.

| - The code bloat problem. A static compiled octave is _much_
|   smaller and _much_ more responsive than a dynamically compiled
|   octave. OTOH, dynamic octave allows more flexibility, which
|   pluggable ATLAS, FFTW etc.
| 
|   This problem is so bad that I find that I'm still mostly
|   using the static compiled 2.1.42 version that I made 2 years ago.

I was not aware of this problem.  When I run Octave built with shared
libraries on a Windows system, it seems as responsive as the version I
have on a Debian system.  OTOH, the .oct files do seem to be
considerably larger.  For a very simple one, I see about 220k on the
Windows system vs. 11k for the Debian version (both are stripped).
Does anyone know what is causing this?

| - The windows custom/cygwin problem. We would like to have a
|   version for cygwin, and also one that has a custom NSIS based
|   installer.

Why?  What advantage does an NSIS installer have over creating Cygwin
packages and using the Cygwin installer?

Likewise, for those who would like to have current versions of Octave
available on OS X in a more timely fashion, I think the best strategy
is to help with the Fink project.  I don't know the details of the
Fink packaging system (isn't it dpkg based?) but it seems that it
should be possible to reduce the effort of making a package to the
point of transferring some files and running a script.

jwe



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