Editing Online Developer Meeting (2022-05-24)

* Date: Tuesday, May 24, 2022 @ 18:00 UTC
* Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev

== Today's topics ==
* The potential use of Jitter and other virtual machines to speed up Octave execution, by Mohammad-Reza Nabipoor.
** [https://octave.discourse.group/t/vm-for-octave-interpreter/2686 Discourse thread]
** '''Unfortunately the speaker didn't show. jwe presented his ideas on VM and linear evaluation instead.'''
* Drop "native" MXE Octave builders from buildbot configuration?
** [https://octave.discourse.group/t/drop-native-builds-from-mxe-octave/2689 Discourse thread]
*** Drop the builder from the buildbot configuration.
*** Don't '''actively''' remove support for native builds from MXE Octave. But don't spend too much time maintaining it. Maybe at some later time, someone will step up to maintain it again.
* Timeframe for Octave 7.2 release?
** Important fixes (among others possible loss of .m file content on exit)
** still unresolved: bug {{bug|62308}} use of octave::feval causes error: function '...' not found
* Update on Fosshost?
** Buildbot worker on ARM hardware?
*** No, see below
*** Maybe, at a later point ask again for access to their AARCH64 server farm.
** Possible to run a Mercurial server? With mirror(?), forks for GSoC students(?), ...
*** Possible, needs setup 😇
*** For the time being, GSoC students should use a public service for their fork.
** Short summary: Octave got one x86_64 server instance '''(2 cores, 4 GB memory, 500 GB HDD)''', useful as webserver probably?!
<syntaxhighlight lang="bash>
$ uname -a
Linux fosshost 5.10.0-14-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.113-1 (2022-04-29) x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ free -h
               total
Mem:           3.8Gi

$ lsblk 
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0   64G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   63G  0 part /
├─sda2   8:2    0    1K  0 part 
└─sda5   8:5    0  975M  0 part [SWAP]
sdb      8:16   0  500G  0 disk 
sr0     11:0    1  378M  0 rom 

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo   # two cores
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 6
model name      : Common KVM processor
stepping        : 1
microcode       : 0x1
cpu MHz         : 2400.084
cache size      : 16384 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 2
apicid          : 0
initial apicid  : 0
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 13
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx lm constant_tsc nopl xtopology cpuid tsc_known_freq pni cx16 x2apic hypervisor lahf_lm cpuid_fault pti
bugs            : cpu_meltdown spectre_v1 spectre_v2 spec_store_bypass l1tf mds swapgs itlb_multihit
bogomips        : 4800.16
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 128
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:
</syntaxhighlight>
:* Access by Arun, jwe, Kai, anyone with time and interest (or '''ideas what to do with it''') is welcome to help with the setup.
:** Kai thinks this could be a webserver, however, what is the benefit to the current situation? 😓
:** See jwe's note here about potential use cases. [https://octave.discourse.group/t/current-recommendation-for-mercurial-hosting/2726/5 Moving hg and buildbot from Digital Ocean to Fosshost]
:'''Kai will start moving the wiki to FossHost; all web-services should move there eventually'''
* State of <code>__unimplemented__</code>
** https://octave.discourse.group/t/implementing-unimplemented-m/2706/5
** Need clarity about the purpose: Helping search vs. Motivate to join Octave community.
* How to implement a classdef class in C++ code only?
** Why is the classdef implementation so complicated? Does it need to be?
** @carandraug and @Maged will look into this for their GSoC project. Pointers welcome.
** Maybe, some kind of documentation could be a result of the GSoC project.

== Previous topics ==

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

* Performance over time (Arun, Rik)
** [https://octave.discourse.group/t/a-small-benchmark-for-interpreted-code-for-three-versions-of-octave/2531/4 Discourse thread for background]
** Analysis and profiling of existing code base -- share and solicit experiences.
** Performance benchmark to track speed over time as part of CI? (Not as part of CI for now, can be done separately, Arun will share progress updates on Discourse)

* GSoC: call for mentors (Nir/Kai)
** Interesting mentors should write to Nir or Kai before: 2022-05-06, ideally before.
** Final deadline (to the sponsor) is May 12.

* Octave 7.1.0 post-release remarks:
** Overall time from merge of default to stable (2021-11-24) until release of version 7.1.0 (2022-04-06): approx. 4 months
*** Why does it take us so long for the last couple of releases?
*** Should we start the release process earlier?
** A couple of bugs have been solved on the stable branch since the release. Last time we released 6.2.0 pretty early after 6.1.0. Should we do the same again?
** Regressions that should probably be solved before a potential 7.2.0:
*** bug {{bug|62308}}: use of octave::feval causes error: function '...' not found
*** patch {{patch|10200}}: wrong axes using stairs in subplot  ---  This affects a lot more plotting functions besides stairs. They always plot into <code>gca</code> and ignore the input axes handle.
*** others?

* Wikipedia updates - minor updates needed to bring up to date.	
** see https://octave.discourse.group/t/octave-wikipedia-pages/2600/1

== See also ==

* Next meeting: [[Online Developer Meeting (2022-06-28)]]
* Last meeting: [[Online Developer Meeting (2022-04-26)]]

[[Category:2022]]
[[Category:Meetings]]