Building on Cygwin platform

Octave can be built on cygwin too !

Pre-requisites

Setup your system the same way as described on the page Octave for Debian systems. The next step, required to generate the documentation, is to tweak a bit the texlive configuration file: (remember cygwin has no sudo command)

   vi /usr/share/texmf-dist/web2c
   

Change

   TEXMFLOCAL = $TEXMFROOT/texmf-site

into

   TEXMFLOCAL = $TEXMFROOT/texmf-site:$TEXMFROOT/texmf

Then run

   mktexlsr
    

Configure

Proceed the same way as on a Unix platform. In this case, the procedure requires a kind of bootstrapping, so it is better to put Octave outside the main directory tree; like f.i.

   ./bootstrap
   mkdir compile; cd compile
   ../configure --prefix=${HOME}/usr

This configuration supposes ${HOME}/usr/bin exists and is in your $PATH.

Build

The procedure is a bit more tricky. Start the build as usual:

   make -j 2 

It will fail after a looong time, while trying to launch ./run-octave. This is a well-known problem, partly caused by issues with the fork() call under Windows platforms. At this time, change run-octave to something simpler:

   #! /bin/sh
   octave_executable="${PREFIX}/usr/bin/octave"
   "$octave_executable" "$@"

Where ${PREFIX} matches the form previously used during the configure stage. In fact, we will use the new Octave, which is not yet operationnal. But never mind. Restart the process as follows:

   make install

This way:

1. The Octave libs and binaries have been generated, they will be copied into their final destination directory.
2. the doc has still to be built. With the modified "run-octave", the executable which will be called is the version just installed during the previous step. Now the doc generation will succeed, and so will its installation.

Enjoy!