Online Developer Meeting (2024-12-17)

Today's topics

Release of Octave 9.3.0?
- Rik and Markus helped jwe make the release files.
- There was a problem with asin on Windows (https://octave.discourse.group/t/failing-test-for-mxe-octave-after-crossbuilding-on-fedora-41/6026/80).
- The release should be done by the time of the meeting. This topic is here as a reminder (as if one is needed) to discuss the release process and the asin bug.

Release of Octave 9.3.0?
- Rik volunteered to shadow jwe while he makes release to learn the process. Markus and NickJ may also shadow event if the timing works out.

buildbot: broken synchronization for stable branch?
- Might have fixed itself by restarting the Digital Ocean server. (The server load was above 100 before the restart. Mainly Python and Apache processes again. Still suspecting the Mercurial web interface.) Will monitor the situation.

GitHub mirror:
- broken synchronization for stable branch?
  - Fixed by Kai on Nov. 25th.
- access permissions for organization members?
  - Base access permission for organization members has been changed from "write" to "read". Higher access permissions should be added on a per-repository level if required.

load path and PKG_ADD issues
- Keep allowing arbitrary code execution in PKG_ADD scripts. Try to avoid the use-after-free when addpath is used in PKG_ADDscripts.

future of octave-cli (also: FLTK, and gnuplot graphics)
- Look into moving FLTK and gnuplot graphics toolkits into Octave packages (if that is easy)
- Eventually remove them from core Octave (regardless of whether they can be moved to packages).
- Rename octave-cli to something that indicates that the main difference is that it doesn't link to the Qt libraries. Users of Octave with the CLI should *not* call octave-cli (but octave, potentially calling octave --no-gui) in the vast majority of cases.
- After the "original" octave-cli has been renamed, potentially, add a new wrapper executable named octave-cli that essentially just forwards to octave --no-gui (to avoid potential issues with hard-coded executable names in build scripts or Makefiles).