Online Developer Meeting (2022-08-23)

• Date: Tuesday, Aug 23, 2022 @ 18:00 UTC
• Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev

Today's 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.
• GSoC activities
  • Haven't been discussed.

Previous topics

• GSoC progress
  • Progress was presented by available mentors. Projects are on track.
  • Openlibm project concluded that the approach doesn't work. Valuable negative result!
  • libtiff project will probably implement the classdef as an .m file. (At least the constructor, which is hard/impossible to implement in C++ code. It is not a "normal" DLDFCN). Will probably move from dld to core (libtiff dependency).
• When should a new function go to core or load dynamically?
  • If the dependencies are already linked into Octave core -> No big benefit to have it dynamically loaded. More sensible to add in core.
  • If function loads a big (new) dependency, it might make sense to load it "on demand". --> dldfcn
• VM progress:
  • Petter presented updates on his VM. Good progress. But still a lot to do.
  • will incrementally move from fork to default branch as an experimental feature with a configure option to disable it.
  • will most likely not be active by default in Octave 8 (either not compiled or de-activated on run-time)
  • won't stop the option for alternative VM implementations. Might help to define an "API" for other VM implementations (like Jitter, etc).
• Release process for Octave 7.2:
  • About 10 (actual) changes since the last release candidate (about 6 weeks ago). Should we make a second release candidate?
    • No new release candidate. Proceed with a release after some final preparations (e.g., NEWS file).
  • Not much feedback for the first release candidate. Should we skip making release candidates entirely and directly make releases? Should we announce them more prominently (e.g., on the web page)?
    • Call for ideas.
• Octave packages progress update
• Managing diversity of libraries (libm, libc etc)
  • See background
• Octave 7.3 and 8 timeline?

See also

• Next meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2022-09-27)
• Last meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2022-07-26)