Online Developer Meeting (2023-03-28)

Today's topics

@jwe's server is now set up as a buildbot worker for buildbot.octave.space (Windows nightlies)
- Worker needs to be started manually on reboot. Other than that it is working.
- Upload is slow. Maybe, skip (building and) uploading the .zip archive. Installer and .7z archive are probably enough.

Octave 8.1 released
- Does it make sense to make release candidates?
- Release Octave 8.2.0 with a couple of urgent fixes (see below) probably soon.

Fix for issue with element-wise | and & in if conditions is already pushed to the stable branch.

Issues when writing to streams while converting output
- @arungiridhar already pushed a fix for streams in binary mode to the stable branch.
- Change default to "no conversion" (i.e., UTF-8) when opening streams with fopen without explicitly specifying an encoding. Matlab also defaults to UTF-8 in newer versions. And this might mitigate the encoding issue (at least with default settings).

Symbol visibility for Octave libraries causing issues for some Octave packages?
- Change default to disable selective symbol visibility again.

Internal representation of character arrays in Octave
- @jwe proposed to open a thread on Discourse if we'd like to discuss this.

NumFOCUS
- Go ahead with application (without waiting for feedback from FSF any longer).

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.