Online Developer Meeting (2022-09-27)

Today's topics

GSoC updates
Octave 7.3 and 8 release timeline.
- Octave 7 was released late (April instead of Jan) and there was interest in releasing Octave 8 earlier. Specifics to discuss:
- Merge default to stable early? October?
- Can we skip 7.3 and go straight to 8?

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.