RE: GSoC project about binary packaging

[John D]

 

 

From: Michael Goffioul [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2013 2:45 PM
To: Octave Maintainers List; Philip Nienhuis; John Donoghue; John W. Eaton; Anirudha Bose; Ben Abbott
Subject: GSoC project about binary packaging

 

Hi all,

 

I've a student who's supposed to work on improving/completing binary packaging of octave on Windows and OS X during the next 2 months. However, I can see that there are already 3 to 4 people actively working on MXE. MXE/octave seems to already work for MinGW cross and native, as well as native Linux. So I'm a bit concerned that there won't be much left to do for the student.

 

So I'd like you to help define clear goals for this project in order to avoid stepping on each other's toes. For instance, I had listed adding support for OpenBLAS as a possible goal for him, but I saw today it had been added to MXE yesterday.

 

Basically, what's left at the moment?

- writing a NSI installer that's a bit smarter than "dump everything"; it should also support smart reinstallation and package addition (as in: re-run the installer to install additional components, which were not selected previously)

- missing octave-forge packages + dependencies

- OS X

(feel free the extend the list)

 

For OS X, I'd like some input from OS X users to assess what's doable. For instance, is it possible to integrate installer building inside MXE (for instance using some native OS X compilation)? I also remember a recent mail from Ben mentioning some new efforts in MacPorts to get octave compiled on OS X.

 

At the end of the day, I hope there will be enough work to be done to make a GSoC project.

 

Thanks,

Michael.

 

 

Im not planning on doing anything with my installer from what I had already done – function was mainly as an easy way to package a test version together to be able install and test it easily. I did note (at least on my computer) if you try to use MUI parts of the installer in linux, that it crashed nsis – I didn’t look at that as it worked good enough for me.

OpenBLAS seems to compile ok for native mingw compile, however might be a little flaky on cross builds? I have one linux computer that compiled it fine, another that did not – I hadn’t looked into why. Also I haven’t looked at what speed differences/advantages there are in using openblas vs blas in octave – it might be good for someone to verify that.

OpenBLAS can also replace some of the lapack functions – I didn’t activate that part, if someone wants to take a look at it.