Re: A group in Norway starts to develop support for multidimensional arrays in Octave.

[John W. Eaton]

On 20-Jun-2003, Joao Cardoso <address@hidden> wrote:

| And some distributors also. Octave is not available under SuSE since
| SuSE-8.0; the problem, I think, is that the stable octave version
| can't be compiled with the shipped gcc.

I think this has changed.  Although it doesn't show up in the
package database on their web site, someone told me that it is on the
latest CD.  I see an RPM file for 2.1.44 on one of their ftp mirrors.

The problem with making a stable release is that I don't want to waste
my time patching it with fixes that I have already made to the
development version.  I tried that before and it didn't work for me.
It took too much energy to keep up with fixes for the stable release.
After only a short while it was not nearly as simple as making diffs
from the development CVS and applying them to the stable sources.  If
someone good would seriously consider taking over a stable release,
then I would consider it.  I have asked in the past, but no one
volunteered.  Maybe things are different now.  If so, and you would be
interested in this job, then speak up.  Otherwise, there is no way I
plan to do it.  I don't see the point of having a particular version
frozen and called stable when it might have serious bugs that would
never be fixed in an updated release.

Another possiblity is to do away with the 2.0.x series and just have
one.  It would not be labeled "stable" or "development" or anything
else.  Then if you want Octave, you get the latest version.  We would 
make releases when we felt comfortable that things were mostly OK and
people who want to work with the latest sources would use CVS.

jwe