Online Developer Meeting (2021-07-27)

• Date: Tuesday, July 27, 2021 @ 18:00 UTC
• Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev-2021-07-27

Todays topics

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

Octave 6.3 released

• No "official" announcement happened. Maybe reuse abandoned mailing-lists to announce important events, such as releases.
• How do distribution maintainers get to know about Octave releases?
  • Contact Debian maintainers of the Octave package to maybe improve our communication (Kai).

Octave 6.4 / 7 / 8

• Discussion how to continue with the development.
  • jwe wants to introduce breaking changes (see below).
• Octave should stick with the ~yearly major release cycle
  • Probably no Octave 6.4 (only if severe bugs occur).
  • Octave 7 (default branch)
    • Should no longer receive "very" breaking changes (e.g. String-class for Octave 8)
    • Has about 305 bugs fixed (not 100% reliable figure) and should not wait another year until many bigger outstanding changes happen (will be deferred to Octave 8)
    • Tentative plan:
      • November 2021 merge default to stable.
      • End of 2021 release of Octave 7
  • Octave 8 (new default branch)
    • No clear decision how to handle very breaking changes until November 2021 merge default to stable. Depends on future needs.

Octave 7 / 8

• Function argument parsing (introduced in Matlab R2019b, rather new)
  • jwe will continue to work on this feature on Octave 7 (default branch)
  • If feature cannot be completed by the end of the year, it will be disabled on parser-level (error), and introduced in Octave 8 one year later.
• New GUI command widget
  • Possible to introduce it as user opt-in in Octave 7
  • Pending issues:
    • Command-widget does not look like the previous one (textbox for command input)
    • jwe needs better looking widget (avoid developing a new one)
    • No possibility to run external applications (like emacs, pager), which is already partially broken now. Need to implement own paging strategy (scroll bars, etc.)
• Deprecation of Octave operators
  • Improve Matlab compatibility
  • Some extensions make it painful to implement Matlab compatible command-style function calls? See also the discussion about this topic.
    • Remove rarely used extensions like "**" power.
    • Discussion about removal of "+=", "++", etc. No final decision made.
    • Often used extensions must probably stay (like "!" or "!=" used in place of "~" or "~=").

C++ shared pointer / liboctave

• jwe had a look at Octave own reference counting
• Wish to replace it with C++ shared pointers
• Expert knowledge wanted! jwe opened a discussion thread
• jwe identified "copy expensive" inefficiency about mxArray to octave_value conversion? (some clarification needed)
  • Root of the trouble lies in historical handling of complex data?? (some clarification needed)

https://octave.discourse.group/t/using-std-shared-ptr-t-to-implement-copy-on-write-objects-in-octave/1436

Previous topics

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

Octave 6.3.0

• 6.3 Release Checklist
• jwe prepared a second release candidate.
• If nothing big shows up, go ahead with the release in about 10 days (early July).

OctConf?

• Instead of an in-person conference, meet up virtually.
• Ideas for code-sprint?
  • Improve test coverage
  • That could include automated tests for GUI features ("expect", Qt test classes, set OCTAVE_SHOW_GUI_MESSAGES to 1 to display signals with missing connections, ...). Does anyone have experience with this?

GUI

• Make widgets more modular
  • remove connections to parents (or parents of parents,...)
  • Only pass settings objects (instead of base qwidget) to widgets?
• Add widgets for:
  • displaying call stack. Select function in stack for appropriate dbup or dbdown command.
  • displaying result to an expression. Similar to debugger (watcher, ...)
• User expectations for evaluation code from the editor ("Evaluate selection") or the variable editor ("plot") while there is still pending input on the command line?

Breakpoints

• Add feature to temporarily disable breakpoints
• Check syntax for breakpoints in subfunctions, local functions, private functions, methods, ... (dbstatus). See: Identifiers for breakpoints

gsvd

• Current version is not Matlab-compatible nor correct in some circumstances.
• Rik is currently implementing a replacement.

IRC channel on Freenode is down?

• Replacement on libera?
• jwe will probably post something on discourse.
• See: IRC channel for Octave (on Discourse).

See also

• Next meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2021-08-24)
• Last meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2021-06-22)