Dear Nicholas
Thank you for the feedback. And yes, you are absolutely right.
It is possible to make a packa out of it. I tried but could not figure
aout the details.
And testing is impossible, as I have no Win* or Mac system.
The compilations steps are rather small for FEMoctave.
Please always keep the help list cc'd. thankfully octave is a community maintained project. It's possible someone on the list could help with turning it into a package. Most people running windows likely don't have to build tools to perform even "small" compilation steps, so packaging this might be the only way to get it to most of those users.