Manual Introduction
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Building Octave is easiest on Unix-like systems, e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, etc. The procedure for building and installing Octave from its sources on a Unix-like system is described in the sections below. To build on other systems requires considerably more expertise, but is possible. Further information on this is available online, such as on the Octave wiki (http://www.octave.org/wiki/index.php?title=GNU_Octave_Wiki), but note that this information is not directly controlled by the Octave authors.
Octave is a large and complex program which depends on many other packages and libraries. The first section below describes how to obtain and install these dependencies before attempting to build Octave itself.
This second section describes the process of building Octave itself. On a Unix-like system building Octave can often be as simple as running a few commands from the terminal. The Octave build system is based on GNU make (http://www.gnu.org/software/make/). This is a commonly used system for compiling large and complex programs. It is often supplied as a standard package, so you are likely to already have it installed. Before running make to build Octave you must also first configure the build process on your system by running a shell script supplied with the source code. This configuration stage is also described in the second section.
Note that this description applies only to Octave releases. If you wish to build the development source, you must obtain them from the Mercurial archive. Building the development sources requires additional steps as described in <Building the Development Sources>. Further information on building Octave can be found in the readme files supplied with the source code.
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Clone the sources
The latest development sources of Octave are available via this Mercurial archive.
With Mercurial and git installed you get the latest development version of Octave sources with the following command:
hg clone http://www.octave.org/hg/octave
If you decide to use the development sources from the Mercurial archive, please read the file etc/HACKING that is available with the source files.
This will clone two repositories, one of which is subrepository of the main Octave repository. Once you have these, you can resync with the archive by doing
hg -v pull ##-v means "verbose", to get more diagnostic output
hg -v update
The -v option is not required but provides extra information about what was pulled and updated. The Octave manual has more information about contributing to Octave's development.