Online Developer Meeting (2023-04-25)

• Date: Tuesday, Apr 25, 2023 @ 18:00 UTC Convert timezones here!
• Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev

Today's topics

• Octave 8.2.0 released
  • Release process went pretty smoothly.
  • If no specific extraordinary motivation, we won't need release candidates for future bug-fix releases.
  • @jwe will try to provide existing helper scripts and instructions for release process.
• Coding Community Events
  • OctConf 2023?
    • @jwe proposed to do that in the form of a developer summit for a couple of days.
    • @Rik offered to open a poll for dates/venue/... on the discourse forum.
    • Probably, at least 6 months lead time.
  • Online coding sprints?
    • Maybe in the form of a loose online meeting for the duration of a weekend?
    • @Rik offered to open a poll for dates/tools/... on the discourse forum.
• GSoC discussion
  • Process for evaluation of student applications has started.
  • Some promising candidates.
• Possible version 9 projects:
  • Qt6 (does that force us to require a C++17 compiler?)
    • Only enablement patches have landed so far. Further integration and bug fixes are still needed.
  • new terminal widget
  • arguments blocks
  • improved breakpoint handling
  • experimental stack-based virtual machine
  • MException object
  • string object (separate from having double-quoted characters create string objects)
  • HDF5-based save and load compatible with Matlab's file format
  • refactor octave_function and classes derived from it
  • broadcasting for sparse
  • make graphics and GUI event processing in the interpreter independent from readline
• Status of Octave Forge
  • should the Octave bug tracker continue to be used for reporting bugs in external packages?
    • Propose package maintainers to move to own trackers.
  • if not, how can we make it easy to find the location to report bugs for a package/package function? How do other systems like Python, R, etc., handle this problem?
• Some old bug reports have been closed recently - thanks!
  Current stats by year:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	total
Octave	1	16	16	41	79	101	160	129	180	201	132	126	117	54	1353
Octave Forge				3	9	19	27	38	28	39	54	44	49	16	326

Previous topics

• @jwe's server is now set up as a buildbot worker for buildbot.octave.space (Windows nightlies)
  • Worker needs to be started manually on reboot. Other than that it is working.
  • Upload is slow. Maybe, skip (building and) uploading the .zip archive. Installer and .7z archive are probably enough.

• Octave 8.1 released
  • Does it make sense to make release candidates?
  • Release Octave 8.2.0 with a couple of urgent fixes (see below) probably soon.

• Fix for issue with element-wise | and & in if conditions is already pushed to the stable branch.

• Issues when writing to streams while converting output
  • @arungiridhar already pushed a fix for streams in binary mode to the stable branch.
  • Change default to "no conversion" (i.e., UTF-8) when opening streams with fopen without explicitly specifying an encoding. Matlab also defaults to UTF-8 in newer versions. And this might mitigate the encoding issue (at least with default settings).

• Symbol visibility for Octave libraries causing issues for some Octave packages?
  • Change default to disable selective symbol visibility again.

• Internal representation of character arrays in Octave
  • @jwe proposed to open a thread on Discourse if we'd like to discuss this.

• GSoC 2023
  • Application period will start soon.

• NumFOCUS
  • Go ahead with application (without waiting for feedback from FSF any longer).

See also

• Next meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2023-05-23)
• Last meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2023-03-28)