Re: Installing Octave

[David Bateman]

Frank Palazzolo wrote:

> David,
>
> I did a mingw build back in January, and as I recall I had two types of
> problems.  One was the readline problems you already cited.  The other was
> that there were a few calls to fork(), which of course don't exist in mingw.
>
>
> A few of the fork() calls were internal, in liboctave\mkdir.c, rename.c, and
> rmdir.c, which I didn't quite understand.  Then there was the fact that
> octave can be multithreaded through the use of fork.  This would either need
> to be disabled to get a "single-threaded octave", or mapped to the native
> windows multithreading calls.
>
> Here is my old message, which isn't very informative...
> http://www.octave.org/octave-lists/archive/help-octave.2005/msg00090.html
>
> Sounds like you've gotten further than I did...good luck!
>
> -Frank
>  
Ahh, I missed the fork calls in rmdir.c, etc. I'd only looked at those 
in *.cc files which didn't seem important. I'm not sure I see why rmdir, 
mkdir and rename need a fork, since all the parent process does is hang 
around waiting for the child to finish. The only reason I can see for 
the fork, is that the child is free to mess with the umask, etc without 
fixing up the mess afterwards, which with careful bookkeeping we could 
fix up anyway. Furthermore these three files aren't even used for me as 
the libc with the latest mingw has mkdir, rmdir and rename. So I never 
even ran across this issue..

The Ffork function in octave will of course be missing, but the cost of 
getting it work would be to take fork.cc from the cygwin sources, which 
is quite large... So I propose to do nothing for the fork issues...

D.

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David Bateman                                address@hidden
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