Re: contributions to Octave projects

[John W. Eaton]

On 28-Jan-2008, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| 1) Do the work needed to get 'imread' and 'imwrite' into Octave. This
| should be a fairly easy task, but you never know what kind of issues
| arise.

I've been giving some thought to this but have not had time to do
anything with it.  I'll start a new thread.

| > - make Octave and R more able to talk with one another.
| I guess this one speaks for it self. I do however think it is a fairly
| hard problem to solve in a nice way. You would need to be able to send
| at least matrices back and forward between R and Octave. Then an API
| would also have to be designed.

Some work has been done on this, mostly by Duncan Temple Lang, one of
the R core developers.  There used to be a link to the code at
http://www.omegahat.org, but I don't see it now and I don't know the
current status.  Given all the changes in Octave recently, I'm sure it
would need some effort to just make it work again.

| > So, along with a current wish list, is there a more specific list of
| > wishes for the three areas I mention above?
| As I said in the beginning of this mail, we usually advise new
| contributors to do what they find fun/interesting.

Also, we like to see discussion of new code before and during its
implementation.  It's best to avoid dropping large patches on us from
out of the blue.  So I'd suggest subscribing to the maintainers
mailing list.

jwe