[OctDev] Re: octave for windows on octave-forge

[Paul K. <pki...@us...>]

Andy Adler wrote:

>On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, Paul Kienzle wrote:
>
>>Andy Adler wrote:
>>
>>>Paul,
>>>
>>>I'd like to upload my octave-for-windows to octave-forge.
>>>I've not had a bug report for a few weeks now.
>>>
>>>Could you create a "octave for windows" package
>>>category and I'll add the file there.
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Don't we already have one in the form of octave-forge-cygwin?  Or is
>>this a pure octave package?
>>    
>>
>This would be for self contained octave-for-windows, using
>the nsis installer.
>
>I consider this to be distinct from octave-forge-cygwin,
>which I intend to keep up, as well.
>
The difference is that octave-forge-cygwin is a developer
tarball which installs into an existing cygwin installation and
the other is a stand-alone which does not require cygwin?

Ideally, I would like the developer version to be tied
to the standalone version so that oct-files created
with the developer version can be installed in the
standalone version and just work.

In that case, I would like the user and developer
versions to be different release files in the same
release.  I know sourceforge will support this since
I've seen it for example in the tcl file release page:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10894

I realize I've said all this before and we are not there yet.

Some issues that remain to be worked out:

* do we ship multiple dll's or one big exe which we
link octfiles against?

* do we build with a light kernel or do we build all
the DLD-FUNCTIONS as builtins?

* if heavy kernel, do we build octave-forge as oct-files
or do we make a super heavy kernel which includes them
all?

* can we build lapack-plain.dll and various lapack-atlas
dlls so that atlas enabling is just a matter of copying the
proper dll to lapack.dll?

* do we build libstdc++.dll?  Or do we dump the
contents of libstdc++.a into libcruft or (in the heavy
kernel world) into the octave.exe?

I've tested the light kernel option.  It works fine except
that the fork problem on recent cygwin for Win 9x is
exacerbated (not only is it slow, it also pops up error
messages for each loaded oct-file).  The solution is to
purge the octave code of fork, but I haven't had a
chance to do so yet.

The heavy kernel option will need some work to make
sure it can support the separately compiled option.  

If super heavy is the preferred option, we could
rework the octave-forge cc files so that they use the
DLD-FUNCTIONS style of #include "blah.h" rather
than #include <octave/blah.h>.  That way you don't
have to construct the octave include directory as part
of the octave source tree. Then it is only a matter of
changing octave/src Makefile so that it automatically
builds everything in the DLD-FUNCTIONS directory
which means that we don't have to edit anything by
hand when building a new release version.

Comments?

Paul Kienzle
pki...@us...