Online Developer Meeting (2022-10-25)

• Date: Tuesday, Oct 25, 2022 @ 18:00 UTC
• Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev

Today's topics

This month's meeting notes https://octave.discourse.group/t/octave-developer-meeting-october-2022/3512.

• Fosshost is currently down with no ETA for coming back. It doesn't look like their availability meets our expectations. Some domains could be moved on short term to other hosts or mirrors. Mid-term, we'd like to move to a different host (e.g., Dreamhost). Ask NumFOCUS if sponsoring would be possible.

Moving the buildbot host and hg repositories might be highest priority.

• Octave 7.3.0 will likely be released during the next week (without a release candidate). Lacking access to the MXE Octave repository (host down), JWE will ask John Donoghue if he has a local checkout of the repository that he could supply.
• Preparations for Octave 8: The default branch will likely get merged to the stable branch early in November. There was no major refactoring this time. So, we hope for a smooth release process.
• It would be nice to get more testers that could check if bug reports can be closed as fixed. They don't need to be maintainers. Anyone could possibly help (preferably on a variety of platforms). Arun Giridhar reached out on Discourse.
• A variety of different (larger) projects were discussed that are candidates for being added for Octave 8. Most of these projects need interested developers that are willing to spend some time in implementing and helping to maintain those features.
• A particular focus was on the string class (again). It might be a candidate for an early addition during the development cycle of Octave 9 (taking leverage of Andrew Janke's .m file implementation in the tablicious package). Having that might allow adapting a range of functions to accepting string objects early on (even if a "final" implementation of the string class might be in C++). Decisions for how to transition to the new syntax for double quotes still need to be taken.
• Other larger features include: a refactoring of the load path implementation, HDF5 interface for saving variables to files, implementation for saving classdef objects to files (probably only using that HDF5 interface), various improvements of the classdef implementation (e.g., better handling of arrays of classdef objects), input handling for the new experimental cross-platform command widget, and many more...
• If possible, it would be nice if all of these projects could be split into smaller, more feasible sub-projects.

• Ongoing technical work: dictionary / associative array
  • Waiting on strings

Previous 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.

See also

• Next meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2022-11-22)
• Last meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2022-09-27)