Re: 3.2.x

[John W. Eaton]

On 22-Sep-2008, David Bateman wrote:

| Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
| > Hi everybody,
| >
| > I couldn't help noticing that the amount of work to port patches from
| > development to 3.0.x increased lately (though it may well be a
| > coincidence), as the code has diverged in many places. Perhaps it is
| > time to fork a fresh stable branch?
| > What do you think? Is the world ready for Octave 3.2.x? Is Octave ready?
| >
| >   
| The status report for 3.2 still has a number of points to address before 
| a 3.2.x release in particular
| 
|    1. Objects:
|       - Operator overloading vs. constant folding

There are a number of things that need to be done for the objects
code, but I don't see that any of it is absolutely necessary for 3.2.

|    +. Handle block comments.  This is not quite finished as block
|       comments inside [] or {}, and also in the group of comments
|       following a continuation character, etc., are not handled.  See
|       the FIXME comments in lex.l.

I think it would be nice to have block comments work everywhere, but
no one really complains much about the lack of block comments in
Octave, so having some limitations is OK by me.  It might make more
sense to try to clean up the lexer (and to some extent, the parser)
while doing this work.  So maybe it would be best left for a later
release as modifications at this level could easily cause some trouble
and delay 3.2.

|  11. Graphics:
|      Basically I believe we need to use the listeners, etc that were 
introduced to make the newly added code useful. I have been working on this, 
bug have bugs at the moment I can't trace down.

I tried looking at the problem but couldn't find the source of the
bug.  I'll try to take another look.

|   Other tasks that should be considered before the release:
| 
|     * Document the graphics changes made by Shai/Michael as needed. (though 
I've tried to do this a bit)
| 
|     * Document the object oriented stuff in a new chapter.
| 
|     * Document the use of private directories.
| 
|     * Document other functions that were ported from octave-forge (eg
|       imread, dlmwrite, etc)
| 
|     + Update the NEWS file.

Yep, as usual, the documentation needs work...

jwe