Re: GSoC Update: Friday (19th July)

[Michael Goffioul]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 12:47 PM, Anirudha Bose <address@hidden> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 10:01 PM, Michael Goffioul <address@hidden> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 12:28 PM, Anirudha Bose <address@hidden> wrote:

On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 5:27 AM, Michael Goffioul <address@hidden> wrote:

The things I'd like to see in the installer are:

- octave with Java support and JIT

- split the installation into several main components:

  . octave (CLI and GUI, with appriopriate links in the start menu)

  . development files (headers, libraries, compiler...)

  . documentation

  you might want to add other components if you think they're useful

Can you suggest any way to segregate the files into components while generating the NSI through the script? I think it is possible only if we write a large part of the NSI file by hand rather than generating it using a script.

There's one important thing I realize only now: the octave-forge packages included in the installer are not precompiled, they're included in source form. This makes the usefulness of defining components in the installer a bit moot. One of the main reason for this decomposition is to avoid installing all the "development" things. But you'll need them anyway if you want to install the packages that are bundled in the installer. At this point, I don't think defining components in the installer makes much sense anymore and I'd rather have you working on other stuffs (see below).

As a side note, this also brings the question of the usefulness to have the forge packages bundled in the installer at all. This adds no value and the same result can be reached with "pkg -forge ...", except for the download step. Moreover, do we even know whether the bundled packages compile fine with octave-3.7.5?

On the installer aspect, one thing that is missing is the inclusion of octave documentation; If I'm not mistaken, the HTML and PDF version of octave are not present in the installer. Could you add them? I think those are not installed by the octave's Makefile, that's why they're not present in the installer. So you'll have to force their installation in the MXE's octave.mk. It would then be nice to add links in the start menu for the octave documentation.

Except for the documentation issue mentioned above, I think you should spend your time on the building aspect and fixing the remaining issues, more than on the installer aspect. For instance:

- I don't think my cross-compiled version of octave have JIT support, even though LLVM is compiled and --enable-jit is given to the configure script

- having Java support requires the presence of Windows version of JDK under Linux; I don't think that's an acceptable solution; suggestions have been made to download only the required JNI headers and use the Linux version of java tools (javac, jar...), while dropping the check for jvm.dll in the configure script

- AFAIK, if you manage to compile in Java support, you get a link error due to the need of -Wl,--export-all-symbols; this could be added temporarily as an octave patch in MXE

Michael.