1. General Users
================

A MInGW bundle is available from sourceforge.

 http://octave.sourceforge.net/index.html

2. Developers
=============

The process for building Octave from source is as follows.

 * Install development tools and compiler
 * Install or compile dependencies of Octave
 * Download Octave source
 * Configure and compile source

We strongly encourage experienced users to build Octave from the
testing and development snapshots to try the latest features of Octave.

A good tutorial on building Octave for version 3.2 is available from 
http://octave.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/octave/trunk/octave-forge/admin/Windows/mingw32/HOWTO.txt 

Additional information beyond the tutorial is summarized below.

 2.1 Development tools and compiler
 ----------------------
 Msys + MinGW development Tools

 The Msys + MinGW development Tools are required to build Octave from source.

 The latest version of the Msys system is 1.0.16.  For MinGW, search and use
 the most recent version available.  Note: The Howto.txt file describing
 the development tools is rather old.

 The latest GCC (GNU Complier Collection) for MinGW is gcc-4.5.0.  Earlier
 versions are not recommended for building Octave 3.4.xx.

 The latest Msys, MinGW, and GCC tools can be downloaded from 
 http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/ 

 (Compiling for 64-bit binaries requires mingw-64 toolkits.  This has not been
  tested.)

 2.2 Dependencies
 ----------------------

 External program dependencies
 
  * gnuplot (you can build this with the shell script mentioned in Howto.txt)
  * MikTeX
  * ghostscript
  * pstoedit (required for printing using FLTK (OpenGL) graphics)
  * fig2dev (Optional; better quality for FLTK printing in some file formats)
  * sed
  * less

 The tools below are required for building the development sources from
 the Mercurial archive, but not for simply building Octave from a snapshot
 tar.gz file.

  * Mercurial
  * git
  * automake
  * autoconf

 Library dependencies

  Please read Howto.txt carefully on how to build them.  The Howto.txt is old
  so some revisions will be required when using GCC-4.5.0

 2.3 Download Octave source
 ----------------------

  The source for testing snapshots can be downloaded from the official Octave
  web site.  http://www.octave.org/download.html 

  The very latest development code is also available via anonymous access to a
  read-only Mercurial archive.  The method of download is described on the web
  site.  You will also need to install gnulib as another dependency.  Please
  visit http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/ and download sources using git.

 2.4 Configure and compile source
 ----------------------

  Building from source can be carried out using the script described in
  Howto.txt.  
  
  When using GCC-4.5.0, remove flags for shared libstdc++ because a shared
  build is already the default.

  When running './configure', you must add '--enable-float-truncate' option. 
  Please see the following thread for more information: 
  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.octave.bugs/12361/focus=12404

  To build development sources from the Mercurial repository you must run
  bootstrap before running configure and make.  This requires
  that automake and autoconf tools be installed.


Tatsuro MATSUOKA
tmacchant@yahoo.co.jp

Benjamin Lindner
bjmldn@gmail.com 


Last updated: Sat Jan 22 17:29:12 PST 2011
