Re: Building on MinGW using MXE-built dependencies [WAS: Re: mxe-installer try 2]

[John W. Eaton]

On 05/26/2013 03:32 PM, Philip Nienhuis wrote:

> The (my) aim is to get as far as ./run-octave, and to be able to build
> and run with --debug-enabled. Once MinGW Octave is sufficiently stable,
> I believe the archive (or installer) made with MXE on Linux is still the
> superior option.

I'm working on some changes that should make it possible to use the
mxe-octave build environment as a native or cross-compile system.

I've focused first on trying to make it work for my Debian system, but
my next step is to try a native build on a Windows system with a
minimal MinGW system installed.

I'm close to being able to do the following on a Debian system that
starts out with no development tools:

  * install the base system (no development tools)

  * install a minimal set of development tools using apt:

      bash, bzip2, gcc, g++, gfortran, make, patch, perl, sed, wget,
      unzip, ghostscript, unzip, libx11-dev, libxext-dev,
      libgl1-mesa-dev, glu, mercurial

  * clone mxe-octave archive

  * make octave JOBS=N

Obviously, this doesn't make much sense on a current Debian system,
but it might on a RHEL 5 system that doesn't have up to date tools.
Or, on a system that has some up to date tools, you could install most
depdencies using the system's package management tool, then install
the rest using mxe-octave.  However, I have no plans to try to
automate that task.  I'm not trying to take over the job of
packaging Octave on systems like Debian and Fedora that already have
good packages for Octave.  I just want to have a reasonable way to
automate the task of building Octave and all the dependencies on
systems that do not have good package systems.

I plan to check in my changes once I've verified that I can still use
mxe-octave to cross compile for a Windows system using the MinGW
compiler, probably within a day or two.

jwe