Online Developer Meeting (2022-09-27)

Today's topicsEdit

  • GSoC updates
    • GSoC successfully completed.
    • Three candidates submitted code.
    • Sarrah spoke about her contributions (Carlo was not present)
  • Since this is the end of GSoC should Sudeepam' #46881 be reviewed for version 8? siko1056 asked why this could not be included in version 7 in 2020.
    • Should the GSoC patches/bugs be labeled as (GSoC <yyyy>) so these are easier to catch?
    • Kai mentioned old GSoC contributions that had not been merged into the tree yet. JWE asked Kai to make a list of such changes, and the people who can review them will need to be rounded up so it can all be merged.
  • Octave 7.3 and 8 release timeline.
    • Octave 7. 1 was released late (April instead of Jan) and there was interest in releasing Octave 8.1 earlier. Specifics to discuss:
    • Should we merge default to stable early? October?
    • Should we skip 7.3 and go straight to 8?
    • Agreed on releasing 8 according to timeline, so merge default to stable in early November
    • Agreed on releasing 7.3 in October
    • jwe would prefer 8.1 to also list the bugfixes not just the new features. Bugfixes are listed for point releases like 7.2 but not yet for new releases.
  • JWE mentioned old submitted patches (not just GSoC) that are languishing in Savannah without being reviewed or accepted. Asked us all to go through patches and review / accept them.
  • Changing PCRE to PCRE2
    • JWE mentioned having to make those changes in regexp functions, but changes are fairly localized, so hopefully easy to make
  • Add memoize as a feature:
    • Arun will update Guillaume's contribution from last year and seek reviews/push in the next couple of weeks
  • Discussion on adding a hashing algorithm to Octave for Matlab compatibility:
    • JWE and Guillaume discussed Matlab 2022b's behavior on their new dictionary type.
    • JWE thinks Octave should accommodate "double.empty" and similar constructs from Matlab.

Previous topicsEdit

  • 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.

See alsoEdit