Re: Octave/Win32 update

[David Bateman]

Benjamin Lindner wrote:
>>> My idea was to distribute only the things needed to build oct files and
>>> support
>>> the octave API. For the rest, I don't know; maybe I could include them
>>> in the
>>> installer as optional packages; but this becomes more difficult than I
>>> thought
>>> to know where to put the limit.
>>>
>> 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..
>>
> 
> But doesn't GPL require you to eventually provide 
> complete source code & build tools for ALL binaries you distribute 
> (i.e. including the numeric libraries)?
> Probaby as a sepreate 'devel' package so that the user who wants to build
> oct files can install it?

Yes the GPL does require that the source is available in its preferred
form and so yes we are supposed to supply the means to down the source
of the GPL components used in the build somewhere. MSVC is a bit
esoteric in terms of its support for most of the libraries used in a
build of octave and so just giving the source and any patches needed for
a MSVC build should be sufficient. I believe Michael wants to put his
build scripts in octave-forge, however officially we still need to
supply a download of the GPL sources... The cygwin installer on
octave-forge at the moment doesn't meet this condition, although the
cygwin environment itself supplies this.

It seems to me a lot of work to do to support this GPL requirement with
a download, so I'd recommend taking the route of a written offer to
supply the source code for the octave-forge supplied binaries on
request, and try and convince the users to go and get the code itself
elsewhere and just use Michael build scripts with this.

> 
> OTOH, if you don't actually need the support files to compile working
> oct files, then the octave headers could be modified to not depend on
> them - this idea has come up around here already.

That would be the best..


> yes, and BIG thanks to the michael & the team. 
> I installed the octave/win32 package and it really gave me the "wow" effect :)
> 
> benjamin