Re: OctaveForWindows Wiki (CategoryInstall) is updated (2009-08-24)

[Benjamin Lindner]

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
> Datum: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:15:22 -0700 (PDT)
> Von: leledumbo <address@hidden>
> An: address@hidden
> Betreff: Re: OctaveForWindows Wiki (CategoryInstall) is updated (2009-08-24)

> 
> > I don't think I get your reasoning. Are you complaining it's using a too
> > old version or a too 'unofficial' version?
> 
> Unofficial. 

I'm a bit surprised. I'd have granted you that it's not the most recent version 
of gcc, but I'd not have picked the "officiality".

> It's only modified a little from the vanilla source hence more
> Unix than Windows in many cases.

Did you actually research this? Can you post some cases where it should be 
"more windows" or where it fails due to being "too much unix"? Otherwise it'll 
be hard to deal with them. 
Or are you merely judging from the 'unofficial' status?
How much modification would be required to make it more acceptable?
(What's an 'official' gcc for win32 platform anyway?)

I use the one I use because
*) it works
*) it provides a shared libstdc++, which is not perfect but also works.

Bug reports, change proposals, patches and feedback is always more than welcome 
and I'll try to incorporate them.

My octave/mingw binaries will move to newer versions of gcc, but if you 
research a bit you'll see that Mingw's gcc has serious threading issues, and 
TDM's most recent port (4.4.1) also has severe issues with execution speed.
So yes, there are more recent versions of gcc, and yes there is a Mingw version 
of a more recent release, but I have not switched yet.

Being 'official' or 'unofficial' is no indication of quality. So is the number 
of patches against vanilla sources.
It's a bit different philosophy that the Mingw project and TDM follow, but that 
does not disqualify either of them.

Have you encountered bugs in TDM's port which are fixed in mingw's port?
Then please report them at the appropriate bug trackers.
Open source software lives and breathes from feedback of users.

BTW, do you know that there are x64 versions of gcc for win64 which are *not* 
provided by the mingw project (and hence also 'unofficial'?).
They look very good, and I'll certainly going to use them for trying w64 builds 
of octave. 

> 
> > Well, Here's the right place to ask questions.
> > If you want to get help you should be more specific in your statements 
> > about what doesn't work or which step causes you problems.
> 
> Configure step, missing termcap AFAIR. And perhaps more libraries.

Well, missing termcap indicates you did not build ncurses libraries.
Missing libraries indicate exactly that - they are missing. You can't actually 
blame them for being missing, nor octave for requesting them.

Have you taken a look at the patches and scripts at the octave-forge 
repository? Everything I use for the binary installers is there. Many patches 
originate from michaels msvc builds, it's by far not all my brains there.

Give it a try and report back. That's how it works in open source.

benjamin
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