Online Developer Meeting (2021-08-24)

Todays topics

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

No "official" announcement happened. Maybe reuse abandoned mailing-lists to announce important events, such as releases.
How do distribution maintainers get to know about Octave releases?
- Contact Debian maintainers of the Octave package to maybe improve our communication (Kai).

Discussion how to continue with the development.
- jwe wants to introduce breaking changes (see below).
Octave should stick with the ~yearly major release cycle
- Probably no Octave 6.4 (only if severe bugs occur).
- Octave 7 (default branch)
  - Should no longer receive "very" breaking changes (e.g. String-class for Octave 8)
  - Has about 305 bugs fixed (not 100% reliable figure) and should not wait another year until many bigger outstanding changes happen (will be deferred to Octave 8)
  - Tentative plan:
    - November 2021 merge default to stable.
    - End of 2021 release of Octave 7
- Octave 8 (new default branch)
  - No clear decision how to handle very breaking changes until November 2021 merge default to stable. Depends on future needs.

Function argument parsing (introduced in Matlab R2019b, rather new)
- jwe will continue to work on this feature on Octave 7 (default branch)
- If feature cannot be completed by the end of the year, it will be disabled on parser-level (error), and introduced in Octave 8 one year later.
New GUI command widget
- Possible to introduce it as user opt-in in Octave 7
- Pending issues:
  - Command-widget does not look like the previous one (textbox for command input)
  - jwe needs better looking widget (avoid developing a new one)
  - No possibility to run external applications (like emacs, pager), which is already partially broken now. Need to implement own paging strategy (scroll bars, etc.)
Deprecation of Octave operators
- Improve Matlab compatibility
- Some extensions make it painful to implement Matlab compatible command-style function calls? (some clarification needed)
  - Remove rarely used extensions like "**" power.
  - Discussion about removal of "+=", "++", etc. No final decision made.
  - Often used extensions like "!" == "~" must probably stay.

jwe had a look at Octave own reference counting
Wish to replace it with C++ shared pointers
Expert knowledge wanted!
- jwe will reach out on Discourse about the exact problems.
jwe identified "copy expensive" inefficiency about mxArray to octave_value conversion? (some clarification needed)
- Root of the trouble lies in historical handling of complex data?? (some clarification needed)