Octave 2.1.61 available for ftp

[John W. Eaton]

Octave 2.1.61 is now available for ftp from ftp.octave.org in the
directory /pub/octave/bleeding-edge:

  -rw-r--r--  1 1005  5500705 Nov  5 18:41 octave-2.1.61.tar.gz
  -rw-r--r--  1 1005  4328394 Nov  5 18:41 octave-2.1.61.tar.bz2
  -rw-r--r--  1 1005    40900 Nov  5 18:44 octave-2.1.60-2.1.61.patch.gz
  -rw-r--r--  1 1005    34372 Nov  5 18:44 octave-2.1.60-2.1.61.patch.bz2

  2fe3bd8465948609bfd65d96d24ee309  octave-2.1.61.tar.gz
  66416e4c219dd1f2a83ec45c6958396b  octave-2.1.61.tar.bz2
  9bcdfa5c486756b35df991c140346e3f  octave-2.1.60-2.1.61.patch.gz
  1e1ef60d3233d55a9a6f57b62714f0ad  octave-2.1.60-2.1.61.patch.bz2


Thanks again to David Bateman for all his hard work to get this
snapshot ready.

This version includes many new features, including integer data types,
inline functions, function handles, concatenation of structs, cell
arrays and user-defined types, and better compatibility with the
leading brand.

Although I believe that 2.1.61 will be quite useable, there have been
many changes and experience says that any number of unexpected problems
could show up just after the tar file hits the ftp site, so 2.1.57
remains the recommended version for now.

I know of one problem that should probably be fixed before we
declare a new recommended snapshot:

  * Comparison operations for 64-bit integers will not work correctly
    for large values (> 2^53) because we are converting to double to
    do the conversions.

and two more that would be nice to fix:

  * Things like [int32(1), int16(1)] will fail.  Concatenation
    operations like this should return an object of the smaller type
    (int16 in this case).

  * Concatenation of simple matrix objects should use a more memory
    efficient method as was done in earlier versions of Octave (but
    the new code has the distinct advantage of allowing concatenation
    for user-defined types, so we can't simply revert to the previous
    method).

As always, if your favorite bug is still not fixed, please report it.

jwe