Online Developer Meeting (2020-07-28)

• Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2020 @ 18:00 UTC
• Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev-2020-07-28

Todays topics

• Meet and greet 5 minutes before meeting (audio testing).

Octave 6 release status

• We should create a first release candidate (RC) Octave 6.0.90 soon. Base for discussing and working on further bug findings.
  • Update gnulib before RC
  • Tag some cset on stable.
  • Build MS Windows binaries.
  • Upload to https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/octave/ .

• Still hard to fix blocking bugs
  • Bug with graphic handles while closing Octave (bug #58814) was reported. This happens when exit is called from a script or when directly calling exit after running the script in the CLI. How to properly handle graphics callbacks during exit?
  • 32-bit MS Windows builds
    • ode15 with Sundials make problems (bug #58795). Maybe already solved.
    • Precision problems failing the test suite (bug #58807). Solvable by requiring SSE2 instructions. Go ahead with it.
    • Unreported GUI problems. Done with (bug #58844).

• Are there breaking changes in Octave 6 to inform package maintainers? No, only deprecated functions are now removed.

• Add script to start GDB session from Octave for debugging, see Debugging Octave.

Octave community

• Changes about the mailing-list advertisements
  • Are there sports left where the help mailing-list is advertised, e.g. GUI? Maybe not.

• Get rid of nabble? (Discussion was short here)

Octave 7 ideas

• Range datatype
  • Should Octave support numeric operations on them?
  • There was a thread on the maintainers mailing-list by jwe. Open discourse thread about it.

• Loading and saving
  • Octave load/save supports a bunch of data types (mat v4, text, ascii, ...)
    • Deprecate some of them? Open Discourse discussion about it.
    • Large array support for Octave's own storage types?
    • Storage of nested functions in mat v4 in Matlab possible?
  • Focus on the HDF5 format in the future. Matlab prioritizes it too, external tools for viewing the files available.
  • Support classdef load/save.

Code sprints

• There was a suggestion to have online code sprints, dedicated to one particular topic, as addition to the online developer meetings.

Ideas for next meeting

Topic suggestions

• The state of octave-buildbot.

See also

• Next meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2020-10-27)
• Last meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2020-07-07)