Online Developer Meeting (2022-04-26)

• Date: Tuesday, April 26, 2022 @ 18:00 UTC
• Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev

Todays topics

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

• Performance over time (Arun, Rik)
  • Discourse thread for background
  • Analysis and profiling of existing code base -- share and solicit experiences.
  • Performance benchmark to track speed over time as part of CI?

• GSoC: call for mentors (Nir/Kai)

• Octave 7.1.0 post-release remarks:
  • Overall time from merge of default to stable (2021-11-24) until release of version 7.1.0 (2022-04-06): approx. 4 months
    • Why does it take us so long for the last couple of releases?
    • Should we start the release process earlier?
  • A couple of bugs have been solved on the stable branch since the release. Last time we released 6.2.0 pretty early after 6.1.0. Should we do the same again?
  • Regressions that should probably be solved before a potential 7.2.0:
    • bug #62308: use of octave::feval causes error: function '...' not found
    • patch #10200: wrong axes using stairs in subplot --- This affects a lot more plotting functions besides stairs. They always plot into gca and ignore the input axes handle.
    • others?

Previous topics

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

Octave 7 RC 2

• No major bugs remain, next will be final release.
  • Done! jwe uploaded 7.1 on 2022-April-06.
• 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. Was solved and tested on the platforms.

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. Done!
  • As of 2022-April-03, Fosshost has offered amd64 and arm64 servers for Octave's use as web servers and buildbots: https://octave.discourse.group/t/project-infrastructure-discussion/1938/14. When it is finalized, Fosshost will notify the Octave devs (Kai?) directly via email.

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.

See also

• Next meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2022-05-24)
• Last meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2022-03-22)