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Re: Release Plans


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: Re: Release Plans
Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 15:42:05 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.12) Gecko/20130116 Icedove/10.0.12

On 04/22/2013 03:31 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

I would like to aim for making a new stable release by the end of
June (this year).

My goals are listed below.  If there are other significant items that
should be addressed, then post them here.  But I would like to keep
the list short so that we have the best chance of making a release in
finite time.

   * A working GUI enabled by default

     - Most necessary features are implemented.  The focus now needs to
       be more on fixing problems with the features that are implemented
       and less on adding more features.

     - QtHandles.  It would be nice to have the windows that wrap the

     - uigetfile.  We have a version that uses FLTK.  We should have one
       that uses Qt to match the rest of the GUI dialog functions.

   * Improved performance for fread and fwrite, at least for common cases
     when no data conversion is required.  I've done some work on this
     job, but it needs to be finished.

   * There are some problems that need to be addressed to improve support
     for 64-bit indexing.

     - We use "long int" to pass 64-bit index values to HDF5 routines and
       that fails on Windows becuase "long int" is 32-bits wide.

     - We need to revise Octave's binary file format so that it can save
       dimensions as 64-bit quantities.

   * Release with Java enabled by default.  The JVM is not loaded
     unless it is needed, so having Java enabled by default should not
     cause trouble for users unless they actually want to try using
     some Java functions.  The only exception is that the dialog
     functions attempt to use Java if the Qt versions are not
     available, but I think that will be a tiny minority of users.

   * Release with the JIT compiler disabled by default.  The JIT
     compiler does not currently compile very many things but a bug in
     the way it compiles and executes a loop would be bad for many
     users.  I also don't think it has had the testing it needs to be
     considered ready for release.

It's past the end of June and although a lot of work has been done on
Octave since April we still have a significant amount of work to do
before making a new stable release.

The GUI is better, but we don't have QtHandles integrated and the
terminal widget does not work properly on either Windows or Unixy
systems.  The biggest problem is that using Ctrl-C for interrupting
the Octave interpreter does not work and we seem to be unable to make
keyboard shortcuts work properly, or to allow users to customize them.
I intend to start a separate thread about these issues.  As I see it,
the GUI is the single largest issue preventing the release from
happening.

I still plan to work on fread/fwrite performance and the 64-bit
issues, but these have a lower priority for the release.

The Java interface is probably OK for release, but we could use a few
small improvements in the way the configuration works.  I think all we
really need to do is test for the JVM at run time instead of configure
time since Octave is not linked directly to the JVM library.

It's easy enough to release Octave with the JIT compiler disabled by
default, so I don't think there is anything to do there.

jwe


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