Re: GSoC project

[Philip Nienhuis]

Michael Goffioul wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 6:11 PM, PhilipNienhuis <address@hidden
> <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
>
>      >> jwe's update said that the dependencies missing in his fork of
>     MXE are
>      >> ghostscript, pstoedit, fig2dev, and Java. The dependency
>     pstoedit has
>      >> already been added (see the list of dependencies in my blog
>     update [1]).
>      >> Should I start my work on adding the remaining of these
>     dependencies?
>
>     After glancing through that list I have a few remarks:
>
>     - There are a number of "of-***" dependencies which are octave-forge
>     packages. Octave is not really depending on those, they're just add-ons.
>     They do no harm but IMO you can ignore these for the time being, it
>     is very
>     easy to add more of those later on.
>
>
> IMO octave forge packages should be part of the final binary. And some
> packages will introduce additional non-trivial dependencies. It seems
> that the core of native/MinGW is already done. Though a significant
> amount of work is left to integrate all forge packages and build
> everything into a nice installer.
>
>     - I've been busy trying to add Java and LLVM in the MXE builds. The
>     stumbling block is that changing configure options for Octave itself
>     leads
>     to build errors, maybe related to cross-compiling.
>     Java had probably best be added once building with MinGW/MXE works
>     natively
>     on Windows. llvm is already built in MXE but somehow it doesn't get
>     included
>     in Octave itself.
>
>
> IMO one should not try to include Java in the binaries. As a user, I'd
> be upset to see octave binary install its own version of Java instead of
> using the one already available on the system.

Yep, I meant "adding Java *support*" (i.e., getting core Java support to 
work).
Indeed, including a JRE would be ridiculous. We don't want to mimic Matlab.

>  >> 2) implement a user-friendly installer for Windows; here my
> suggestion is
>  >>> to re-use (and re-engineer) the installer I used to use for my MSVC
>  >>> binaries
>  >>>
>  >>
>  >> Can you give me some resources of the installer you had used earlier?
>
> In MXE there's already a basic installer (NSIS) built in (see #8051 in the
> patch tracker). In Octave-Forge there's an older NSIS build script for the
> 3.2.4 Octave binary, see:
> http://sourceforge.net/p/octave/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/octave-forge/admin/Windows/mingw32/octave.nsi.in
>
> That's funny. The reference above is actually a rip-off my own installer
> script... :)

Did Benjamin rework yours? (I assume the URL points to the script he 
used; that is, Jordi pointed me to it some years back when I mentioned 
Benjamin's installer to someone)
Wouldn't surprise me, your work is all over the place.

>  > OK it takes up a bit of disk space [1] (should be no big deal these days)
>  > but it is very convenient for the majority of potential Windows users to
>  > have this build environment already present in their Octave installation.
>  > For the developers there's an advantage too: user support, debugging and
>  > solving problems gets a lot easier if the included build tools are
>  > standardized.
>  >
>  > [1] Today's cross-compiled MXE binary takes up around 500 MB after
>  > installation in Windows. This includes a build environment sufficiently
>  > complete for binary octave-forge packages (provided these do not need
>  > additional dependencies).
>
> Well, if all developers are using the same reasoning, your HDD will
> quickly get cluttered :). The fact that disk space is cheap these days
> is not a reason to waste it.

200 MB for MSYS/MinGW is still better than 2.2 GB for MSVC. At least it 
would allow for installing binary packages without (hopefully) provoking 
too much user support requests ("How can I get package 'foo' installed?")

>  As a user, if I already have MSYS installed
> on my system, I'd rather have octave use it instead of installing its
> own version. Octave should still be shipped with a stripped down version
> of MSYS, but its installation should be optional.

Well, you are not quite a standard 'plain-vanilla' Windows user.

I suppose for the majority of Windows users-as-we-think-we-know-them it 
does make sense to include some basic standardized build tools to enable 
them to install/upgrade binary packages directly from Sourceforge, or 
from anywhere else for that matter.
AFAICS the included build tools in mxe-octave suffice for just that. I 
tried doing more (i.e., building Octave) but to do so I needed to expand 
and augment it considerably to just get a first start (configure to run).

A main motive of the mxe build (as I understood it from jwe) was to 
offer a standardized environment so that support and assistance with 
debugging etc. would be simplified for the developers.
It would also save developers the hassle of separately packaging OF 
packages, like you did for the MSVC binaries (although I know that e.g., 
several Linux distros have other opinions, or traditions).

Perhaps the build tools/MSYS could be an installation time choice that 
should explicitly be deselected to avoid installing them.

Philip