Cross compiling GNU Octave from GNU/Linux for Windows

[Martin Helm]

After I succeeded some time ago to compile octave with mingw on windows
(3.4.3 and development version) it turned out that I really do not like
to do that since almost everything I do is done on GNU/Linux systems
(most of the time on openSUSE, sometimes on Debian) esp. if it comes to
development.

So the natural question was, why not cross compiling it. I started a few
days ago to make myself a bit familiar with the mingw cross compiler
environment (did this on openSUSE) and were able to cross compile some
libraries from scratch and also octave.

Since I noticed the configure script created by autogen.sh is not very
suitable for this, it was necessary to do some ugly (and dirty) hacks to
make this possible.

Has anyone else tried that and is maybe more experienced and willing to
share his/her knowledge?

If there is any interest at all in that I will summarize the problems I
found (and the hacks I applied) during this weekend for further
discussion to find a better and clean way to support that.

I need to mention that cross compiling from GNU/Linux to Windows is a
new field for me and that I am not that much familiar with gnulib and
auto* tools which gave me some headaches, so progress will be very slow
with what I do.