There have been a lot of changes in the project lately, thanks to Michael, Philip, and others. It is now possible to cross-compile Octave with Java support enabled. Earlier I was having trouble getting Java support. The fix was to patch configure.ac of Octave to add “-Wl,–export-all-symbols” to the load flags (see bug# 39454), recalculate its SHA1 checksum, and put it in the src/octave.mk file.
Meanwhile, Jordi has set up a Mercurial repo for me where I can make my changes publicly available. Here is the public link to my repo. I have done some work on the installer scripts. Hopefully we will have a fully working installer for Octave before the mid-term evaluations. I also found some time to learn about how to use Mercurial from Hg Init. It helped me understand the basics of Mercurial in a very short time. I seem to like Mercurial now. :)
During this week, I will focus on adding more features to the installer script. I will write another post detailing about the planned features in the installer, and also about the work I have already done.
Cheers!
GNU Octave: Improve Binary Packaging 