Online Developer Meeting (2022-09-27)

Today's 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.

```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.

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.