Re: GSoC 2013

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 25 April 2013 10:38, Anirudha Bose <address@hidden> wrote:
> I am a first year Computer Science undergraduate at International Institute
> of Information Technology, Bhubaneswar in India.

Hello, welcome.

> I have gone through the ideas page of GSoC 2013, and the project which
> interests me is "Improving Binary Packaging" since I think I have the
> required knowledge prerequisites.
> I have already discussed briefly about the project with Jordi Gutiérrez
> Hermoso on IRC. Kindly let me know if there are any more details regarding
> this project.

I have already given you most of the details on IRC, but I will
summarise again for the benefit of everyone else:

The problem is that at the distributing binaries for Octave and its
Octave-Forge packages for anything other than a GNU system is
annoyingly difficult. You're free to suggest any solution you can
think of, but the currnet solution underway is to cross-compile from
GNU into other systems. There are two programs that can help with
this, one of which is MXE and the other is GUB. MXE is only for
Windows, but the solution for it is already more or less complete: it
is now possible to cross-compile Octave from scratch into Windows with
MXE. GUB also targets Mac OS X and pretty much anything for which gcc
can compile to, but it needs a lot of updating. If you want to work on
GUB, you will need to hack both its Python and a few things about its
Makefiles.

You should only undertake this project if you have a solid
understanding of software build system, cross-compilation (or can
suggest an alternative), and software distribution. You should also
ideally have access to several operating systems on which you can test
your results.

- Jordi G. H.