Hi,
I've met some helpful people at the GNU Hackers' Meeting that pointed me
towards build farms that automatically updates and builds repositories.
One of them was Hydra, which unfortunately didn't have Mercurial
support. The Hydra people just emailed me and said they added support
for Mercurial, and even better, they have Octave building on the system.
So now I just have to figure out how to maximize the opportunities
given to us. The coverage thing is very interesting and I wish I had
time to really dig into it
http://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/gnu/octave-default
http://www.gnu.org/software/devel.html#Hydra
Grundberg