Re: Patch for REAME.MSVC (compilation of libf2c)

[younes . a]

Quoting Michael Goffioul <address@hidden>:

> Abdelrazak Younes a écrit :
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am a long time user of Octave and this new MSVC support caught my
> > interest. I saw that you changed the Autotools to support MSVC and
> > NMake basically, is that right?
>
> Not exactly. I provided wrappers for MSVC build tools (cl and link) such
> that they
> behave like gcc and ld. Based on a shell like MSYS, you are then able to
> re-use the
> complete build system of Octave, while you're actually compiling with MSVC.

I see. Thanks for the explanation.


> > May I suggest that you consider using CMake or Scons instead? Within
> > the LyX project we use all three building systems with success. I
> > might add that the MSVC builds are much faster than the mingw builds.
>
> I'm not a CMake user, so I can't compare. However, octave build system
> relies on
> various shell scripts. Switching to CMake would somehow require to port
> those scripts
> to CMake.

Not necessarily, CMake provides ready to use scripts for most common Gnu tools.

> Is this easily feasible?

I don't know for sure as I am not a CMake expert either but this looks like an
easier to maintain solution that the wrappers. The nice thing about CMake is
that it generates Gnu makefiles for Gnu tools (including MSys make) and MS
projects for MSVC. You can then use the MSVC IDE for developping and debugging
which is quite nice.
In the LyX project, we link with a number of GnuWin32 provided libraries (zlib,
iconv, etc) without problem.

Anyway, I just wanted to draw your attention to this possibility... just in case
this could help you in your porting work ;-)

Abdel.