Online Developer Meeting (2020-07-07)

• Date: Tuesday, July 7, 2020 @ 14:00 UTC
• Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev-2020-07-07

Todays topics

• Meet and greet 5 minutes before meeting (audio testing).

Octave 6 release status

• We should create a first release candidate (RC) Octave 6.0.90 soon. Base for discussing and working on further bug findings.
  • Update gnulib before RC
  • Tag some cset on stable.
  • Build MS Windows binaries.
  • Upload to https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/octave/ .

• Still hard to fix blocking bugs
  • Build (RC) anyway!
  • crashes during doc graphics creation seem to be fixed (bug #56952)
  • still elusive crashes while running the test suite on the build bots (bug #57591) -> Maybe the broader user base of an RC can shed some light on "real-life frequency" of these crashes.
  • possible background: interaction between graphics system and interpreter is different from interaction of rest of GUI with the interpreter. Possibly resolvable by a copy-on-write approach for graphics objects (postponed to Octave 7)
  • calling script from nested functions (bug #58691 fixed)
  • empty list creation if one element is not assigned (bug #58686 not a blocker)

• Try to tackle bugs with debuggers
  • valgrind slow
  • -fsanitize=thread in memory and faster

• Before Octave 6.1.0 release, discharge MS Windows 10 Malware Detection Systems (e.g. upload to https://www.virustotal.com/)

Community Infrastructure (Kai)

• Discourse for GNU Octave
  • Replacement for mailing-lists (help@octave.org and maintainers@octave.org) and https://planet.octave.org
    • TODO: Advertise on Octave homepage and announce on mailing-lists
  • Badge system
  • Discussions are welcome
    • Max. image upload size: (Yes) There is not a restriction in the file size, but in the megapixels max image megapixels = 40 and dimension max image width = 690, max image height = 500.
    • Max. edit time: Yes, there is editing grace period = 300 seconds, but admins can edit any post.
  • See also https://octave.discourse.group/t/do-we-want-to-adopt-discourse/39
• (No time left, maybe next time) Hosting Octave main website on "https://www.octave.org" (jwe's dreamhost.com account) rather than "https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/", see Project Infrastructure.
  • Updating Octave's main website is pain (CVS, see Makefile)

See also

• Next meeting: TBA
• Last meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2020-06-09)