Online Developer Meeting (2023-04-25)

Today's topics

Octave 8.2.0 released
Coding Community Events
- OctConf 2023?
- Online coding sprints?
GSoC discussion
Possible version 9 projects:
- Qt6 (does that force us to require a C++17 compiler?)
- new terminal widget
- arguments blocks
- improved breakpoint handling
- experimental stack-based virtual machine
- MException object
- string object (separate from having double-quoted characters create string objects)
- HDF5-based save and load compatible with Matlab's file format
- refactor octave_function and classes derived from it
- broadcasting for sparse
- make graphics and GUI event processing in the interpreter independent from readline
Status of Octave Forge
- should the Octave bug tracker continue to be used for reporting bugs in external packages?
- if not, how can we make it easy to find the location to report bugs for a package/package function? How do other systems like Python, R, etc., handle this problem?
Some old bug reports have been closed recently - thanks!
Current stats by year:

@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).