Online Developer Meeting (2022-08-23)

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Today's topics

  • 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.
  • GSoC activities
    • Haven't been discussed.

Previous topics

  • GSoC progress
    • Progress was presented by available mentors. Projects are on track.
    • Openlibm project concluded that the approach doesn't work. Valuable negative result!
    • libtiff project will probably implement the classdef as an .m file. (At least the constructor, which is hard/impossible to implement in C++ code. It is not a "normal" DLDFCN). Will probably move from dld to core (libtiff dependency).
  • When should a new function go to core or load dynamically?
    • If the dependencies are already linked into Octave core -> No big benefit to have it dynamically loaded. More sensible to add in core.
    • If function loads a big (new) dependency, it might make sense to load it "on demand". --> dldfcn
  • VM progress:
    • Petter presented updates on his VM. Good progress. But still a lot to do.
    • will incrementally move from fork to default branch as an experimental feature with a configure option to disable it.
    • will most likely not be active by default in Octave 8 (either not compiled or de-activated on run-time)
    • won't stop the option for alternative VM implementations. Might help to define an "API" for other VM implementations (like Jitter, etc).
  • Release process for Octave 7.2:
    • About 10 (actual) changes since the last release candidate (about 6 weeks ago). Should we make a second release candidate?
      • No new release candidate. Proceed with a release after some final preparations (e.g., NEWS file).
    • Not much feedback for the first release candidate. Should we skip making release candidates entirely and directly make releases? Should we announce them more prominently (e.g., on the web page)?
      • Call for ideas.
  • Octave packages progress update
  • Managing diversity of libraries (libm, libc etc)
  • Octave 7.3 and 8 timeline?

See also