Re: More on MinGW build

[J Luis]

> | I would really love to be able to build Octave under windows and even
> | much more if that could be done entirely with VS or Inter compiler.
>
> You are free to use other compilers if you like, but the build system
> will require a Unixy shell environment.  There is simply no way we are
> going to maintain VS project files (or whatever they are called) in
> addition to the build system we currently have.

Though I understand, that's what I really sorry. Not VS projects but
(me dreaming) who knows a CMake solution.
It is my believe that this would contribute greatly to attract a large
number of windows users that would than easily compile their mexs,
which currently they can do only under Matlab (I am one of them).

> Even if you choose to build with the MinGW compiler, can't you do that
> when using Cygwin to host the build environment?  The last time I
> tried, Cygwin was pretty straightforward to install.  You migth also
> look at the mingw-64 project, as that seems to have recent GCC
> versions and I think versions that are built to run in Cygwin bug
> produce binaries for Windows (without Cygwin).  Building this way may
> require some form of cross compiling (to avoid having the configure
> script think that it is building Octave for Cygwin) but I'm willing to
> help with that as ultimately I'd like to be able to cross compile
> Octave for Windows on a GNU/Linux system.

Well, probably cross-compiling in Cygwin can be done but I lack the
knowledge for that. I do have Cygwin, which I use mostly for testing
because running scripts with it is often painfully slow. But I am
trying to build with MinGW. I stopped because of the of the building
error that I mentioned in my previous mail.

> Also, with MSVC, you can't legally distribute the resulting binaries
> due to licensing restrictions.  I don't know whether there are similar
> problems with the Intel compilers.

Excuse me to ask, but are you sure of that? I never heard such thing.
MS has even free EXPRESS versions of their compilers.
AFAIK what is not legal to distribute are the debug runtime MS libraries.

> That would be great, as I think it makes a lot more sense to have free
> software tools not depending on proprietary ones.
>
> | But to think
> | that I will have to build all dependencies with the messy mingw is not
> | really motivating for me.
>
> Are you trying to say that we are somehow responsible for that?

By no means. Sorry if I gave that impression. It's GDAL that depends
on a lot of external libraries, but it could perhaps replace the
ImageMaigc dependency with advantage.

Joaquim Luis