Re: GSoC project

[Anirudha Bose]

On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 2:02 AM, Michael Goffioul <address@hidden> wrote:

On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 1:41 AM, Anirudha Bose <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Michael. My build process was interrupted because of a small bug in older versions of tex2dvi. I have CC'ed you the issue I had discussed with jwe. I had to do a small change in the file tex2dvi and now I am compiling octave again.

The time taken to compile octave (till I get the error) is close to 200 minutes (this is why I have to wait so much to see any result, which maybe be a build failure). I am expecting to finish it soon.

Compiling octave is long, but 200 minutes seems quite a lot, if you're compiling under Linux (even cross-compiling) with a decently recent computer. FYI I'm using a dual P4 3GHz from 2008, so it's not really new, though I don't think it takes more than 3 hours to compile octave. You might want to increase the number of "make" jobs to use parallel compilation.

 

Meanwhile, I have taken a look at your patch in the attachment msvctools-libiconv.bz2 to jwe and tried to make sense out of it referring to your old mail on the efforts previously done to cross-build octave for Windows.

This is basically trying to port my build script for MSVC to MXE. This is a bit out of the scope of your GSoC project. MSVC it nos part of the "officially" supported compilers for octave. You should focus on GCC/MinGW.

Next week starts the first coding session. I'd like you to define clear goals for this first session, so that we know where we're going. So far it seems that MXE is a good candidate, at least for native Linux, native MinGW, cross MinGW. There are already a few people heavily working on making it work for native MinGW and cross MinGW, so IMO your focus should be among those:

1) get quickly up to speed with native MinGW and help polishing the last bits not working

jwe's update said that the dependencies missing in his fork of MXE are ghostscript, pstoedit, fig2dev, and Java. The dependency pstoedit has already been added (see the list of dependencies in my blog update [1]). Should I start my work on adding the remaining of these dependencies?

[1] http://wp.me/p3D9SG-c

2) implement a user-friendly installer for Windows; here my suggestion is to re-use (and re-engineer) the installer I used to use for my MSVC binaries

Can you give me some resources of the installer you had used earlier?
Can we do something so that Windows users do not have to install MinGW/MSys or Cygwin to run Octave? If MinGW or Cygwin is indeed necessary to run Octave (haven't checked yet), then perhaps we can include their installers as a part of our setup.

- Anirudha