Re: octave.mk MXE file still necessary?

[John W. Eaton]

On 06/21/2018 12:06 PM, Rik wrote:
> All,
>
> I just checked the recipes for making in Octave in the MXE src/ directory
> and I find stable-octave.mk (4.4.0), default-octave.mk (5.0.0), and
> octave.mk (4.2.0-rc4).  Do we need the last recipe?  I think it is
> confusing because without any other information I would think to build just
> octave.mk, and that would get me a very out-of-date version.

I agree that it's a bit of a mess right now.

I'm not sure how best to manage this or what the names of the targets 
should be, but my goals would be to allow the following four configurations:

  * building from the current default branch in the hg archive.  As we 
do now, it's fine with me if this requires creating a tarball from the 
current hg sources separately from mxe-octave.  This configuration 
allows testing for the next major release.

  * building from the current stable branch in the hg archive.  This 
can work the same way as for default, but just using the stable branch. 
This configuration allows testing for the next bug-fixing stable release.

  * A way to build the last stable released version of Octave from 
ftp.gnu.org but with the latest mxe-octave tools and dependencies.  This 
configuration allows us to check whether the last stable release can 
still be built with new versions of tools and dependencies.

  * A way to build the last stable released version of Octave from 
ftp.gnu.org with the same versions of mxe-octave tools and dependency 
libraries.  This configuration allows anyone to reproduce the builds 
that we distribute.

  * A way to build the last stable released version of Octave from 
ftp.gnu.org but with the latest mxe-octave tools and dependencies.  This 
configuration allows us to check whether the last stable release can 
still be built with new versions of tools and dependencies.


At least the first two configurations should be built and tested often 
by the buildbots.  The others are less important but seem useful to have.

jwe