Online Developer Meeting (2023-02-28)

Today's topicsEdit

  • Future of buildbot.octave.space: https://octave.discourse.group/t/future-of-buildbot-octave-space/3993
    • Current worker will go down some time in March.
    • @jwe or @pr0m1th3as will check together with Kai if they could provide hardware that could be used as a replacement worker.
    • Minimum requirement for worker: ~ 1 GiB storage per "flavor". "Fast enough" to build all "flavors" in 24 hours.
    • Plan is to check @jwe's machine first. If upload speed is an issue, continue to check with @pr0m1th3as' machine.
  • Future of packages being maintained at sourceforge.net: https://octave.discourse.group/t/are-there-still-any-maintainers-for-octave-forge/4002
    • Package index has already switched to GitHub.
    • Documentation is still hosted on SourceForge.
    • @pr0m1th3as proposed to suggest maintainer of packages that are hosted on SourceForge to move to GitHub.
    • @cbm and @jwe mentioned that we should try to keep the risk of "vendor-lock-in" at a commercial service in mind.
  • Octave accepted to GSOC 2023
    • Students can apply 20th of March to 4th of April 2023.
    • Unclear who is mentoring.
    • It was agreed to remove (HTML comment) all projects from the GSoC Wiki page and ask potential mentors to only (re-)add those projects that they are able to see through this year.
  • Discourse display and connection issues
    • Multiple users have issues connecting to the side or get strangely formatted layout.
    • Arun will contact Discourse support desk.
  • Octave 8.1
    • Decision to release Octave 8.1 shortly.

Previous topicsEdit

  • Release candidate?
    • First RC released
    • Discussion about automating release process, which is currently manual and error-prone
    • Discussion about whether we can do continuous delivery: head of stable branch would be the released version. No decision yet.
    • jwe will announce the availability of the first release candidate with a new thread on the Discourse forum.
  • Eliminate doc/liboctave?
    • See thread on Discourse forum
    • Only 3400 lines, maybe 2700 lines without license text
    • JWE aims for the Doxygen to be stable and helpful, like the Qt docs
    • nrjank will look through files to list any with information worth retaining. That information should be moved to inline doxygen comments if it is useful.
  • Coding style changes
    • Discussion on where to add content from wiki. Converged to /etc/<something>. Maybe split the current HACKING.md file into multiple files for different categories (e.g., style, release process, ...).
    • C++: specify void or not. Converged to removing void in code that is not (extern) C.
    • C++: brace initialization lists
    • C++: default member initialization
    • C++: Rule of 3 / Rule of 5, move constructors, move operators, etc
  • GSOC 2023 timeline
    • Org applications: Jan 23-Feb 7, notified Feb 21 (reapply supposed to be 'easy')
    • Contributor proposals: Mar 20-Apr 4, Rankings due 4/27, Selections announced May 4
    • nrjank will go ahead with preapplication activities: solicit mentor interest from Octave devs, reach out to Nir re application mechanics
    • nrjank will also look into Google Season of Documentation (GSoD)

See alsoEdit