mxe-octave status

[John W. Eaton]

With current Octave and mxe-octave the default-octave target works forme 
when doing builds for native GNU systems and cross compiling for 
Windows-64 with either qt4 or qt5.  I'm also building libGL from the 
Mesa package for consistent software rendering (more about that below). 
Here are the configurations I'm using:

Options common to all builds:

  --with-pkg-dir=/a/common/dir/for/source/downloads
  --with-ccache
  --enable-octave=default
  --enable-binary-packages
  --enable-devel-tools
  --disable-system-opengl

Windows builds (the common options above, plus):

  --enable-windows-64

GNU systems (the common options above, plus):

  --enable-native-build
  --enable-lib64-directory
  --enable-pic-flag
  --disable-system-x11-libs
  --disable-system-fontconfig
  --disable-system-gcc
  gnu-linux

and then choosing qt4 or qt5 with either --disable-qt5 or --enable-qt5.

For the native GNU builds, I'm able to build LLVM and Mesa can use that 
to generate the llvmpipe version of the swrast OpenGL driver and 
performance seems good.  For Windows, I haven't figured out how to build 
a version of LLVM, so it uses a different and apparently slower 
implementation of swrast.  It still works, but not as smoothly.

Also for the GNU builds, we are now able to build and include in the tar 
file nearly everything that is needed to run Octave.  Installing and 
running a copy and then using lsof to examine the list of open files, I 
see only the following open outside of Octave's installation directory 
tree (using qt5):

  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.24.so
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.24.so
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.24.so
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm-2.24.so
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnsl-2.24.so
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_compat-2.24.so
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.24.so
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_nis-2.24.so
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread-2.24.so
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt-2.24.so
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1.6.6
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libutil-2.24.so

  /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive

  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gconv/gconv-modules.cache

  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/croscore/Cousine-Regular.ttf
  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf
  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono-Bold.ttf
  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf
  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf

On Windows systems with qt4, I'm able to move aside the mesa version of 
opengl32.dll and use the Windows OpenGL library (confirming with 
__opengl_info__).  But with qt5, doing that causes Octave to freeze.  I 
assume it's a segfault, but I haven't been successful with any attempt 
at debugging.

There are a few optional packages that we are currently not using, or 
that we are not building separately (Qt provides them), but that we 
could use or build separately.  These include libjbig, icu, 
double_conversion, and libproxy.  I could use some help creating 
makefile fragments for these packages.

I could also use some help with building LLVM on Windows systems if 
anyone has a clue.  Preferably version 5, which we are currently 
successfully building on GNU systems.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

jwe