installing packages under windows

[hydrodog]

The package installation in octave is somewhat bewildering.
There are three related questions here.
1. How to get the fits package working under cygwin.
2. How to get any package working standalone in Windows 7.  It is ok if I
have to use cygwin to build the code, but can I package the binaries so that
someone not using cygwin could use these packages with octave under windows?
3. Why is there no prebuilt library set of everything, including all
libraries used by the libraries?  Surely, if someone wants to do curve
fitting in Windows, requiring this laborious process is ridiculous.  I'm
willing to build some of this, or even all of it, but if I do so, why should
anyone else have to?  Is there a big problem with a makefile that builds all
of this?  I'm willing to contribute but something tells me there's much more
to this than meets the eye.

Forgetting for the moment about trying to do it to a standalone windows
version of octave, I just installed in cygwin.  So now the environment is
essentially linux, with gcc-4.5.3 installed.

I started with fits-1.0.1.tar.gz because I happen to want to do an
exponential fit.
in the directory with the package, within octave:

octave:7>pkg install fits-1.0.1.tar.gz

Package cfitsio was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `cfitsio.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable

First of all, there is no documentation on what cfitsio is.  There is no
file cfitsio.pc.  Is there some library external to fits that is needed?  It
would be nice if it said that somewhere.

pkg install optim-1.0.10.tar.gz

fails because it needs struct.  At least that's comprehensible.
After installing struct, it works, with warnings

octcdf fails because it needs netcdf, so I got and built the latest C
library 4.2
pkg install octcdf-1.1.4.tar.gz 

then fails because of lots of missing symbols, an example:
.../Downloads/code/netcdf-4.2/libsrc4/nc4hdf.c:759: undefined reference to
`_H5Sselect_hyperslab'
This last one is netcdf specific, but since there are so many errors I can't
see the first ones, how can I redirect pkg install output


--
View this message in context: 
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/installing-packages-under-windows-tp4630900.html
Sent from the Octave - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com.