Online Developer Meeting (2022-09-27)

• Date: Tuesday, Sep 27, 2022 @ 18:00 UTC
• Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev

Today's topics

• GSoC updates
  • GSoC successfully completed.
  • Three candidates submitted code.
  • Sarrah spoke about her contributions (Carlo was not present)

• Since this is the end of GSoC should Sudeepam' #46881 be reviewed for version 8? siko1056 asked why this could not be included in version 7 in 2020.
  • Should the GSoC patches/bugs be labeled as (GSoC <yyyy>) so these are easier to catch?
  • Kai mentioned old GSoC contributions that had not been merged into the tree yet. JWE asked Kai to make a list of such changes, and the people who can review them will need to be rounded up so it can all be merged.

• Octave 7.3 and 8 release timeline.
  • Octave 7. 1 was released late (April instead of Jan) and there was interest in releasing Octave 8.1 earlier. Specifics to discuss:
  • Should we merge default to stable early? October?
  • Should we skip 7.3 and go straight to 8?
  • Agreed on releasing 8 according to timeline, so merge default to stable in early November
  • Agreed on releasing 7.3 in October
  • jwe would prefer 8.1 to also list the bugfixes not just the new features. Bugfixes are listed for point releases like 7.2 but not yet for new releases.

• JWE mentioned old submitted patches (not just GSoC) that are languishing in Savannah without being reviewed or accepted. Asked us all to go through patches and review / accept them.

• Changing PCRE to PCRE2
  • JWE mentioned having to make those changes in regexp functions, but changes are fairly localized, so hopefully easy to make

• Add memoize as a feature:
  • Arun will update Guillaume's contribution from last year and seek reviews/push in the next couple of weeks

• Discussion on adding a hashing algorithm to Octave for Matlab compatibility:
  • JWE and Guillaume discussed Matlab 2022b's behavior on their new dictionary type.
  • JWE thinks Octave should accommodate "double.empty" and similar constructs from Matlab.

Previous topics

• Octave 7.2 has been released
• VM activities:
  • Configure switches to enable/disable compiling the VM have been added.
  • No actual VM code has been pushed so far. It needs to be rebased on a (more) current head.
• Transition to Fosshost:
  • The buildbot server has been moved from the Digital Ocean server to Fosshost. The Digital Ocean server will be retired.
  • The new buildbot server URL is https://buildbot.octave.org (without explicitly specifying a port). Documentation still referring to the URL with the port number might need to be updated.
  • The Fosshost server is periodically mirrored to the Dreamhost server. This is likely to stay that way unless someone complains.
• shadowing of core functions from statistics package
  • Packages should try to avoid shadowing core functions as far as possible.
  • As a "compromise" to make newer features available to older Octave versions, packages could conditionally shadow core functions depending on version numbers. See, e.g., [1] for a possible approach.

See also

• Next meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2022-10-25)
• Last meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2022-08-23)