Online Developer Meeting (2022-08-23)
Today's topicsEdit
- 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.
- GSoC activities
Previous topicsEdit
- GSoC progress
- Progress was presented by available mentors. Projects are on track.
- Openlibm project concluded that the approach doesn't work. Valuable negative result!
- libtiff project will probably implement the classdef as an .m file. (At least the constructor, which is hard/impossible to implement in C++ code. It is not a "normal" DLDFCN). Will probably move from dld to core (libtiff dependency).
- When should a new function go to core or load dynamically?
- If the dependencies are already linked into Octave core -> No big benefit to have it dynamically loaded. More sensible to add in core.
- If function loads a big (new) dependency, it might make sense to load it "on demand". --> dldfcn
- VM progress:
- Petter presented updates on his VM. Good progress. But still a lot to do.
- will incrementally move from fork to default branch as an experimental feature with a configure option to disable it.
- will most likely not be active by default in Octave 8 (either not compiled or de-activated on run-time)
- won't stop the option for alternative VM implementations. Might help to define an "API" for other VM implementations (like Jitter, etc).
- Release process for Octave 7.2:
- About 10 (actual) changes since the last release candidate (about 6 weeks ago). Should we make a second release candidate?
- No new release candidate. Proceed with a release after some final preparations (e.g., NEWS file).
- Not much feedback for the first release candidate. Should we skip making release candidates entirely and directly make releases? Should we announce them more prominently (e.g., on the web page)?
- Octave packages progress update
- Managing diversity of libraries (libm, libc etc)
- Octave 7.3 and 8 timeline?