OctConf 2018 Notes
We will be taking notes as OctConf is going on. Keep an eye on this page.
Monday
Talking
- jwe presented state of Octave development
- Michele Ginesi presented his Octave work on special functions
- list topics for discussion and work for this OctConf
- this very page
- frequency of Octave releases
- a new release from stable this OctConf. A new release from default in 4 weeks time. From now on, new releases every year in January with freeze before the Christmas holidays.
- implementing String class
- Matlab added double quote strings, which instantiate objects of their new String class. This behaves different from our double quote strings because it does not escape special characters. Being Matlab compatible will mean being backwards incompatible. Decided to first implement the String class and make the Octave internals handle it. Then we will worry about having the double quotes create them and decide about the escaping of characters.
- scope of functions in script files
- Matlab scripts can now include function definitions. However, these behave different from Octave scripts in two ways:
- functions defined in script files are locally scoped and will not be available after running the script
- functions in the script file can de defined in the script after the statements that use them while Octave requires them to be defined first.
- jwe says that this behaviour should be simple to implement but will be backwards incompatible. Solution is to have the run function change and behave like Matlab does. Currently, the function source is the same as run. The function source will keep the old behaviour and can be used to source a file to import functions definitions into the global scope, as if the sourced file had been ran in the interpreter.
Doing
- email maintainers mailing list with conclusions
- done by carandraug
Tuesday
Talking
- future GSoC students
- we have questioned the value of this. Most students don't stay after GSoC and most projects do not get merged into core and the packages. Even if it costs us no money, it costs us a lot of time since most students need a lot of hand holding, and it's the whole community that is actually mentoring. Ignoring the students is also not nice to them. Nir is the person responsible and he's not attending this year so we are not deciding anything. However, we need to ensure that students know much, and do a better job at filtering out clueless students.
- refactoring (threading) / developer docs / symbol naming / liboctave interface stability and usability
- These are all very related issues. We have some issues threading and those are mainly because we don't know how to do things properly. Some of us have learned how since but we don't have that knowledge shared and so it's a bit of lack of documentation for ourselves. We decided that changes to Octave internals, the C++ stuff, will need to include doxygen docs for the things that it changes. We have notes on how to write doxygen docs on our C++ style guide.
- We also have builds of doxygen docs online, including development version http://octave.org/doxygen/ but they are not up to date. jwe will set his build bots to update the doxygen docs daily.
- We also discussed making available builds of the default branch for users. This would be nice because we get users reporting bugs earlier. However, we are afraid that people will not understand that the latest version is a work in progress, not the latest usable version. So we decided against making such builds available.
- test coverage
- measurements of performance
- Octave Forge community
- To increase the pool of high-level users we need to reduce even more the burden to install and distribute packages independently. To do this we bring back the idea of allowing `pkg` to download and install directly from a url to a `.zip` file or `.tar.gz` file, e.g. `pkg install 'https://myrepo.org/mypackage.zip'`
- There will be no checks (nor quality standard) on these packages and the user should be clearly warned about the insecurity (y/n answer?).
- * Should `pkg update` also work for these packages? Maybe no. Just re-run the install command.
- * We need to provide guidelines, recommendations and tools for people trying to distribute their packages. We are doing something in this direction, but we need a little boost here: https://octave.sourceforge.io/templates/Makefile, https://sourceforge.net/p/octave/example-package/ci/default/tree/
- packages into Octave core
Doing
- merging of previous GSoC projects
- Rik merged Ginesi's special functions and Carlo's worked on merging ode45
- polygon reconstruction algorithm
- Rik and Pantxo worked on this
- new release
- jwe been preparing for wednesday's release
- dinner in town
- email maintainers mailing list with conclusions
Wednesday
Talking
- review our review of code contributions
- build system issues
Doing
- new Octave 4.2.2 release
- new release of image package
- more tests to increase code coverage
- CERN visit
- email maintainers mailing list with conclusions
Thursday
Talking
- OctConf 2019
- pending discussions and work
Doing
- email maintainers mailing list with conclusions