Re: Standalone windows install: why?

[Paul Kienzle]

On Mar 31, 2005, at 1:32 PM, Brian Blais wrote:
> If I were to add to this pie-in-the-sky wish list, I would like the
> version of octave to have -enable-dl and -enable-shared options on, 
> even
> if gcc was not bundled with it, just so that it *could* run .oct files
> compiled on another machine.

I'm not sure this is feasible.  To get a reasonable install size you
need to link to shared version of stdc++.  Unfortunately, the ABI for
C++ is not stable and so not only do you have to match octave versions
on your oct files, you also have to match gcc versions.

One solution is to control the complete tool chain, providing a minimal
cygwin shipped with octave, and a full-featured development cygwin for
octave development.  Wasteful, yes, but reliable.

A second problem, at least for things involving prepackaged cygwin
libraries like libpng, is that cygwin tags the version number in the
name of the DLL.  These version numbers have to match on the build
system and the install system.  The simple answer here is don't link
against prepackaged cygwin libraries.

- Paul



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