More on MinGW build

[J Luis]

Hi,

I finally decided to give a try on building Octave on Windows and ...
ai the thing is not easy.
To start with I find the installation of Msys/MinGW a real mess.
Instructions on Internet are completely outdated and now that things
appear to be more stable (in past experiences there was always one
autotool that didn't work well), it also misses several components.
I had to find blas & lapack (my attempt to compile atlas crashed with
an apparent conflict with the MS msvcrt.dll), readline and gperf. Next
I encountered the mentioned
 https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?32192
 https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?32200

bugs, but were 32200 happened with file-io.cc, applied the patch and
moved on to this one not reported previously

gl-render.cc: In member function 'virtual void
opengl_renderer::text_to_pixels(const std::string&, uint8NDArray&,
Matrix&, int, int, double)':
gl-render.cc:3217:3: error: 'text_renderer' was not declared in this scope
gl-render.cc: At global scope:
gl-render.cc:3222:1: warning: unused parameter 'txt'

Note also that the README.MinGW file mention a Howto.txt file

http://octave.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/octave/trunk/octave-forge/admin/Windows/mingw32/HOWTO.txt

that doesn't exist any more, so I had to proceed blindly. Until I
stopped at the above error.

I would really love to be able to build Octave under windows and even
much more if that could be done entirely with VS or Inter compiler.
I'm part of the GMT team and we are aiming to have all GMT5 programs
to run as mexs on both Matlab and Octave.
I don't know if you guys know GMT (http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/gmt/)
but it gives a lot of the functionalities of the ML Mapping Toolbox
(and MUCH faster). And with it, it comes the possibility to use
another very popular library in the GIS comunity - GDAL. But to think
that I will have to build all dependencies with the messy mingw is not
really motivating for me.

Best regards

Joaquim Luis