RE: Using msys2 for mxe-octave

[JohnD]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John W. Eaton [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: Monday, August 13, 2018 4:14 PM
> To: JohnD; address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Using msys2 for mxe-octave
> 
> On 08/13/2018 02:20 PM, JohnD wrote:
> > Now that Octave 4.4.1 is here, I've been playing around with getting octave
> > to work using msys2 rather than the old msys, and have pushed up a patch:
> >
> > https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/index.php?9675
> >
> > It provides a --with-msys2 option to the mxe-octave configure script, which
> > will build the installer/tarball with the msys2 system utilities and
> > libraries rather than the msys ones.
> >
> > In addition it has pacman (the msys2 package manager) installed and allows
> > downloading of other msys2 packages easily from within the installed
> > application.
> >
> > Apart from the msys2 packages that get installed, the octave packages and
> > build tools will get installed in <base>/mingw32 or <base>/mingw32, rather
> > than the base directory which is where the native application like gcc etc
> > would be installed in msys2.
> >
> > I haven't pushed it to mxe-octave as yet, waiting on whether it's a good
> > thing to have and other comments.
> 
> As I understand it, msys is no longer supported, so I think this is a
> good change.
> 
> Can we (easily) build these packages from source as part of mxe-octave?
> 
> If not, does your change preserve the downloads of the corresponding
> source packages so thet we can distribute both binaries and the sources
> that were used to build them?
> 
> jwe

Currently, it does not attempt to build from source - I am not sure if it can 
without some Cygwin stuff, but would be something to look at.

It also currently doesn’t grab the sources, which is really just a matter of 
adding additional source rules like was done for msys.
Does it have to package the sources ?
They are available from 
https://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/files/REPOS/MSYS2/Sources/