Re: Compiling octave with MSVC

[John W. Eaton]

On 11-Oct-2006, Andy Adler wrote:

| So, while I understand that John may not see it worth his time to support
| such an effort, I am personally a big fan of the ability to compile octave
| with MSVC.

It is fine to compile Octave with non-free compilers, but I will not
accept changes that make Octave harder to maintain simply to support a
non-free compiler.  Instead, we need to work toward changes that can
be included in the main Octave sources rather than having patch sets
to be applied to each Octave release.  The reason I think it is bad to
have patch sets to support MSVC, or a separate build environment that
must be maintained in addition to the normal one is that it is a lot
of extra work and can lead to unnecessary differences in the code.  It
also takes time to update the patch set to work with new releases of
Octave.  It would be much better if it just works.

It is also possible that the code in Octave is buggy or not standard
conforming, and that is the reason that it fails to compile with a
MSVC (or some other non-free compiler).  If you show me that this is
the problem, then I generally have no objection to fixing the bug or
changing Octave so that it is standard conforming and can be compiled
by more than just GCC and the few other compilers that I have used
(the Sun and Cray compilers are the only ones that I can think of at
the moment).

jwe