>> If you want to build oct-files that use FFTW then it seems logical to me
>> that the header files of FFTW should be installed.. The responsibility
>> should be on the builder of the code to ensure that they have the
>> require files except the minimum needed to build basic oct-files.. An
>> interesting test to see how many problems we might have is to try and
>> build the octave-forge packages that have no external and see what the
>> problems are..
>
> Another way around this problem is for Octave to provide wrappers for
> all these kinds of functions, and only expose the interface to the
> wrappers in its header files. But that's more work, and I'm not sure
> it is worth the effort. Or, we could severely limit the external API
> and just tell people to use feval if they want to use any function
> that is defined inside Octave (similar to mexCallMATLAB).
Normally, if you only use octave API, you only need the support files for
octinterp/octave/cruft. Other support files (I mainly mean .lib and .h files)
are only needed if you use directly functions from those libraries in your
code. However, in that case, it'd be better that the builder uses the same
files as those used to build octave, because:
1) compiling UNIX-oriented libraries with MSVC is far from straightforward
(believe me...)
2) the builder should link his code against the same runtime as octave,
to avoid any problem (this is automatic if you use mkoctfile as compiler)
Here's a list (+/- exhaustive) of support libs I recompiled with MSVC,
in order in importance (according to me):
Core numerical libs
- BLAS
- LAPACK
- FFTW (this one, I didn't recompile, but used the available binary)
- HDF5
Core support libs
- ZLIB
- READLINE
Libs used by core oct-files
- PCRE
- GLPK
Libs used by octave-forge oct-files
- NETCDF
- LIBJPEG
- LIBPNG
- GSL
Other libs, used by additional tools (gnuplot, octplot)
- GLIB
- CAIRO
- PANGO
- INTL (from gettext)
- ICONV
- FLTK
- FREETYPE
(Things I'm working on: CLN and GiNaC, to add the symbolic
toolbox from octave-forge).
IMO, only the first set (core numerical libs) is really relevant. For the
others, I don't think so.