Online Developer Meeting (2022-03-22)

• Date: Tuesday, March 22, 2022 @ 18:00 UTC
• Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev

Todays topics

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

NumFOCUS

• https://octave.discourse.group/t/apply-for-numfocus-sponsoring/2328

Octave v8.0

• Would it be worthwhile to look into Sergio Burgos' gui editor?
  • https://gitlab.com/labinformatica/guieditor

Package problems

Communications

• bug #46521 is still lingering with nir_krakauer and lostbard there has been significant progress.
  • Should some energy be directed to closing this? Not related to Octave itself.

Signal

• There has been tremendous work submitted by Charles Praplan, JWE, and others.
  • However it appears none of this has been incorporated.
  • After release of version 1.4.1; is this no longer being maintained?

Previous topics

The following items were not discussed. Just some links to progress on those items are displayed.

Release process of Octave 7.1

• Blocking issues: 8 open bugs targeting 7.0.90, 3 marked as "ready for test" (see Savannah overview on octave.space)
• Good progress on some of the blocking issues by jwe. Most important remaining ones:
  • bug #61788: arrays of type int16 contain wrong numbers
    • The :-operator will probably be changed to return an array (instead of a range object) before Octave 7.
    • Image package had trouble with this change (bug #61815). These changes should be reviewed with the next Octave 7 release candidate.
    • jwe summarized options for the release in comment #18 of the bug report.
    • jwe will revert most changes on "stable" (Octave 7) and continue developing on "default".
  • bug #61813: memory management bug when calling MEX that returns an output
    • @jwe check in a fix that will also revert to copying data in the .mex interface (less efficient, but also the way it has always been done until now) unless Octave is compiled with C++17 pmr.
    • This also avoids the malloc-operator delete[] mismatch.
    • Confirmed fixed now.
  • bug #61821: segfault using tree_parameter_list in oct file
    • Lower priority, only 32-bit (only on Windows?). Maybe a compiler bug?
    • Not a blocker.
  • bug #61898: subsref: Error when field syntax is used on non-scalar @class object
    • Not a bug in Octave core. Recent changes to output argument validation uncovered an issue in interval package.
  • Similar bug #61843: Regression with subscripted assignments with arrays of objects
    • Older regression.
  • Use suffix for API string when it requires C++17 pmr?
    • Should indicate if Octave was compiled with C++17 support or not.
    • Need to recompile packages.
    • Agreed to avoid suffix. Leave things as is.
  • bug #61687: Ignore not updated translations. Open new bug report for further translations.
  • There will be soon a second release candidate.

Minimum Qt5 version for Octave 8?

• No real conclusion. Wait for progress with Linux distributions.
• See Qt5.15 already unsupported upstream (except commercial license)?

libinterp

• suggestion to prefer std::copy_n instead of for-loop to duplicate data
  • try to avoid making too many copies anyways!
• rik updated about the progress on bug #61753 (https://octave.discourse.group/t/project-to-review-and-replace-c-assert-with-error-calls/2043)
  • jwe suggest to use proper C++ exceptions in some future release of Octave, instead of error function pointers.

dynamic loader (oct-files)

• jwe worked on refactoring dynamic code loading with std::shared_ptr, also for reference counting.
• Not clear if there is a portable "standard" way of loading code dynamically (oct-file). Ideas are welcome.

See also

• Next meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2022-04-26)
• Last meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2022-02-22)