Online Developer Meeting (2020-07-07)

• Date: Tuesday, July 7, 2020 @ 14:00 UTC
• Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev-2020-07-07

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
  • Build (RC) anyway!
  • crashes during doc graphics creation seem to be fixed (bug #56952)
  • still elusive crashes while running the test suite on the build bots (bug #57591) -> Maybe the broader user base of an RC can shed some light on "real-life frequency" of these crashes.
  • possible background: interaction between graphics system and interpreter is different from interaction of rest of GUI with the interpreter. Possibly resolvable by a copy-on-write approach for graphics objects (postponed to Octave 7)

• Other important bugs
  • calling script from nested functions (bug #58691 fixed)
  • empty list creation if one element is not assigned (bug #58686 not a blocker)

• Try to tackle bugs with debuggers
  • valgrind slow
  • -fsanitize=thread in memory and faster

• Before Octave 6.1.0 release, discharge MS Windows 10 Malware Detection Systems (e.g. upload to https://www.virustotal.com/)

Community Infrastructure (Kai)

• Discourse for GNU Octave YES, we give it a try! 😁
  • Replacement for mailing-lists (help@octave.org and maintainers@octave.org) and https://planet.octave.org
    • Leave old mailing-lists as they are now, but no longer actively advertise them.
    • TODO: Advertise Octave Discourse on Octave homepage and announce on mailing-lists
  • Badge system, will stay active for the start
  • Discussions are welcome
    • Max. image upload size: (Yes) There is not a restriction in the file size, but in the megapixels max image megapixels = 40 and dimension max image width = 690, max image height = 500.
    • Max. edit time: Yes, there is editing grace period = 300 seconds, but admins can edit any post.
    • Possible exit strategy in case we don't like Discourse?
      • Return to still active mailing-lists always possible.
      • Disable Posting in that Forum, try to leave it as archive. If Discourse does not allow archives, we can export the SQL database and try to host the knowledge on some other facility.
  • See also https://octave.discourse.group/t/do-we-want-to-adopt-discourse/39
• (No time left, maybe next time) Hosting Octave main website on "https://www.octave.org" (jwe's dreamhost.com account) rather than "https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/", see Project Infrastructure.
  • Updating Octave's main website is pain (CVS, see Makefile)

See also

• Next meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2020-07-28)
• Last meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2020-06-09)