[OctDev] 2.1.36 support

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

Hi all,

I've done a number of changes so that everything will
now compile on octave 2.1.36 and up. I tested it on
2.1.36, 2.1.38, 2.1.40 and 2.1.45.  The changes were
surprisingly minor once I had a handy TRY_MKOCTFILE
macro to work with in configure.  This gets us to
last May.  Is it worth cutting a new version for this?

There are some issues with m-files.  First, there
may be gaps because some functions have moved
from octave-forge to octave.  Interested parties
can make an extra/backport directory which is only
installed for older versions of octave.  Second,
there are changes in octave syntax which we cannot
support without an m-file preprocessor.  Third,
there are various bug fixes in octave which we
either need to work around or ignore.  Until we
write [and call!] tests for every m-file, I don't
know how big a problem we have.

Paul Kienzle
pki...@us...