Re: mxe-octave and MXE status update

[Michael Goffioul]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 5:40 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:

Now that the MXE maintainers have started to support shared libraries and building with mingw-w64 sources, I've been working with them to get Octave and its dependencies included in MXE itself so we may eventually not have to duplicate the effort of maintaining all the packages ourselves.

You can take a look a the recent mailing list threads on the MXE mailing list here:


http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/mingw-cross-env-list/2014-02/index.html

There are some big advantages to the way MXE has handled shared libraries and different targets over what we've done.  For example, you can use a command like

  make MXE_TARGETS="i686-w64-w64-mingw32.shared x86_64-mingw-w64-mingw32.shared" lapack

to build lapack for both 32- and 64-bit targets simultaneously (in separate directory trees for each target type).  This kind of thing could help us with building things like the nsis installer which doesn't currently build for 64-bit Windows.

Instead of integrating things like building the installer package as targets in the MXE build system, we could just create a build system for Octave and dependencies that uses MXE to build what we need, and the our build environment would put all the pieces together.

The MXE folks are not as interested in native builds, but they seem willing to consider making the targets and Makefile rules more general so that it should be possible to also use MXE for native builds.  Then we should be able to eliminate the need for mxe-octave.  The fact that we've already mostly done it with mxe-octave at least provides a proof of concept.

Comments?

I somehow doubt that the MXE guys will ever accept the MSVC parts I've put into mxe-octave. In that case, if mxe-octave is dropped, I'll probably get back to my own build scripts.

Michael.