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).

Octave 7 RC 2

• No major bugs remain, next will be final release.
• Bug #62207 "segfault in bug-35881/bug-35881.tst in 32-bit ARM and MIPS" appeared. But maybe not a blocker, as only 32-bit ARM and MIPS seems affected. No Octave maintainer can reproduce due to missing hardware.

NumFOCUS

• https://octave.discourse.group/t/apply-for-numfocus-sponsoring/2328
  • Kai will reach out for them.

Bus factor problem, revisited

• Any infrastructure changes to make in 2022? Web hosting?
  • We are looking for options to become less independent on private sponsored web servers, but not need to rush.
• FossHost accepting applications again [1]
  • Arun will reach out for them.

Octave 8

• Would it be worthwhile to look into Sergio Burgos' gui editor?
  • The authors of the software did not get in contact with the Octave developers.
  • The creator of this item did not attend the meeting, thus unclear what should be achieved.

GSoC 2022

• Maintainers of symbolic package unresponsive. If no communication gets established by the weekend, this project will be dropped to avoid applicants putting energy in this.

Package problems

• Package problems have to be settled with the package maintainers. Forks are possible anytime: GPL.

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. See note in bug report.

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? Not related to Octave itself. Please reach out for the package maintainer about future plans. If one is interested she might offer to become new package maintainer.

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)