MinGW build of octave

[David Bateman]

Dear All,

As I've mentioned on the lists I've been looking at a MinGW build of 
octave, and now have something that I think is good enough to share with 
others. You'll need to recover the two files from 
http://www.dbateman.org/octave, then follow the instructions below, 
adpated to your own preferences and existing setup.

Reference [1] http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml

* Download MinGW-4.1.0.exe and use it to install compilers (using 3.4.2 
personally)
* Download MSYS-1.0.10.exe and install minimal environment (install in 
c:\msys)
* Download msyDTK-1.0.1.exe and instal it for autoconf, etc (install in  
c:\msys)
* Use the wget mingwPort package to install wget (Warning binary version 
of wget supplied with package seems broken, and so you must download the 
source of wget by hand at the same location)
* Use zlib mingwPort package, which can be download since built version 
of wget works
* Go to the www.activestate.com page and install msi version of 
ActivePerl (I'm not sure that this step is now necessary with msysDTK as 
msysDTK also has  perl, but haven't checked)
* Use my own readline 5.0 mingwPort package to install readline 
libraries from http://www.dbateman.org/octave/readline-5.0-mingwPORT.tar.bz2
* Get ftp://ftp.gnuplot.info/pub/gnuplot/gp400win32.zip and unzip under c:\
* Now you can build octave
 - Download version 2.9.3 or later of octave
 - untar and apply supplied patch from 
http://www.dbateman.org/octave/patch-mingw-2.9.3.gz
 - Use autogen.sh to rebuild configure, etc
 - export PATH=$PATH:/c/gnuplot/bin
 - configure --prefix=/mingw/octave-2.9
 - make
 - make install-strip
* cmd.exe
 
PATH=%PATH%;C:\MinGW\bin;C:\msys\bin;C:\MinGW\octave-2.9\bin;C:\gnuplot\bin
 octave

Note, don't use msys rxvt to launch octave.. The pty emulation in msys 
rxvt is seriously broken and readline will therefore not work correctly. 
Cygwin rxvt seems fine but implies that you must have cygwin installed, 
which kind of misses the point of a mingw build. So use cmd.exe by 
preference. I presume someone will want to write an IDE under windows in 
the long run in any case and so redirecting stdout/stdin from a console 
app will avoid this issue.

Also note the fork issues with mingw were not an issue, perhaps due to 
the version of gcc I used having rmdir, mkdir and rename defined, and so 
liboctave/{rmdir.c,mkdir.c,rename.c} were ifdef'ed out.. However this 
means that Ffork won't work in the mingw build. The cost of including an 
implementation of fork basically means that all of the code in cygwin 
fork.cc needs to be included in octave (or probably mingw) this is also 
seems unlikely, so Ffork will probably never be implemented in mingw.

I'm not completely happy with the patch yet as it has one remaining 
issue in that ctrl-c at the prompt is not working correctly (though is 
elsewhere). Note that I also had to reinclude the glob directory in 
octave as this is missing in the mingw/msys stuff. Problems that I know 
I have fixed include

- readline works in cmd.exe
- ctrl-c works except at the prompt (take Paul Kienzle for the help)
- Loadable modules (ie octfiles)
- Path seperator issues that were preventing octave finding its scripts. 
Path seperator is now ";" under mingw rather than ":" elsewhere.
- a problem with popen's use in help (ie passed /dev/null) that prevent 
texinfo help from working
- install issues due to the lack of ln that was preventing a full 
install, in particular of the libraries and oct-files
- Saving of .octave_hist file now happens in %HOMEPATH% if %HOME% isn't 
defined, same for .octaverc
- Some issues of \r\n in the documentation fixed-up (is this completely 
resolved? Do we care if the docs are already build.. WARNING 2.9.3 has 
some timestamps of some *.txi that force rebuild!!)

I haven't extensively tested the patch, but I did test the script in the 
g++ sjlj/dwarf2 bug report that is causing the speed issues before 
embarking on this effort and demonstrated that a mingw build did no have 
the speed issues. So I expect this build of octave to be significantly 
faster than the cygwin builds. As this stuff will take a while to 
finalize I'm also working against 2.9.3 (note not the CVS, but will 
upgrade at next 2.9 release), and have no intention of porting this to 
the 2.1.x tree.

Next steps include fixing the ctrl-c issue at the prompt, and starting 
to port such libraries as fftw, atlas, gplk, hdf5, umfpack, etc for use 
by octave. Finally building the relevant stuff from octave-forge and 
their support libraries, should also be done. Once that is done we can 
look at using the NSIS installer that Paul has been working on in 
octave-forge to build a simple install for windows users. If anyone 
wants to try this stuff out, I'd love to get some feedback.

Regards
David

--
David Bateman                                address@hidden
Motorola Labs - Paris                        +33 1 69 35 48 04 (Ph) 
Parc Les Algorithmes, Commune de St Aubin    +33 1 69 35 77 01 (Fax) 
91193 Gif-Sur-Yvette FRANCE

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