Online Developer Meeting (2023-02-28)

Today's topics

Future of buildbot.octave.space: https://octave.discourse.group/t/future-of-buildbot-octave-space/3993
- Current worker will go down some time in March.
- @jwe or @pr0m1th3as will check together with Kai if they could provide hardware that could be used as a replacement worker.
- Minimum requirement for worker: ~ 1 GiB storage per "flavor". "Fast enough" to build all "flavors" in 24 hours.
- Plan is to check @jwe's machine first. If upload speed is an issue, continue to check with @pr0m1th3as' machine.

Future of packages being maintained at sourceforge.net: https://octave.discourse.group/t/are-there-still-any-maintainers-for-octave-forge/4002
- Package index has already switched to GitHub.
- Documentation is still hosted on SourceForge.
- @pr0m1th3as proposed to suggest maintainer of packages that are hosted on SourceForge to move to GitHub.
- @cbm and @jwe mentioned that we should try to keep the risk of "vendor-lock-in" at a commercial service in mind.

Octave accepted to GSOC 2023
- Students can apply 20th of March to 4th of April 2023.
- Unclear who is mentoring.
- It was agreed to remove (HTML comment) all projects from the GSoC Wiki page and ask potential mentors to only (re-)add those projects that they are able to see through this year.

Discourse display and connection issues
- Multiple users have issues connecting to the side or get strangely formatted layout.
- Arun will contact Discourse support desk.

Release candidate?
- First RC released
- Discussion about automating release process, which is currently manual and error-prone
- Discussion about whether we can do continuous delivery: head of stable branch would be the released version. No decision yet.
- jwe will announce the availability of the first release candidate with a new thread on the Discourse forum.

Eliminate doc/liboctave?
- See thread on Discourse forum
- Only 3400 lines, maybe 2700 lines without license text
- JWE aims for the Doxygen to be stable and helpful, like the Qt docs
- nrjank will look through files to list any with information worth retaining. That information should be moved to inline doxygen comments if it is useful.

GSOC 2023 timeline
- Org applications: Jan 23-Feb 7, notified Feb 21 (reapply supposed to be 'easy')
- Contributor proposals: Mar 20-Apr 4, Rankings due 4/27, Selections announced May 4
- nrjank will go ahead with preapplication activities: solicit mentor interest from Octave devs, reach out to Nir re application mechanics
- nrjank will also look into Google Season of Documentation (GSoD)