Octave 3.1.53 available for ftp

[John W. Eaton]

A new snapshot of Octave is now available from ftp.octave.org in the
directory /pub/octave/bleeding-edge:

  1d3203c2a8ff266248fa8cad239f08ac  octave-3.1.53.tar.bz2
  248be566be0be05d7d543dafeb5948ad  octave-3.1.53.tar.gz
  9a9b60edc98604efda580e70a222f685  octave-3.1.52-3.1.53.patch.bz2
  486604da0f53f088aa4a5324b9ec8ef7  octave-3.1.52-3.1.53.patch.gz

  -rw-r--r-- 1 506 1012 11128992 Feb 25 23:35 octave-3.1.53.tar.bz2
  -rw-r--r-- 1 506 1012 12881620 Feb 25 23:38 octave-3.1.53.tar.gz
  -rw-r--r-- 1 506 1012   448613 Feb 25 23:33 octave-3.1.52-3.1.53.patch.bz2
  -rw-r--r-- 1 506 1012   545445 Feb 25 23:33 octave-3.1.52-3.1.53.patch.gz

The snapshot is tagged in the usual way (ss-3-1-53) in the Mercurial
archive and will be marked as the "development" version of
Octave on the download page of the Octave web site.

Please remember that these snapshots are provided for testing
purposes.  I do not consider them to be Octave releases.  If people
think there will be confusion because of the version number, then we
can add a notice to the Octave startup message.  Changing the version
number to something like ss-2009-02-25 is not an option because it
will cause trouble with typical version comparison functions (for
example, that are sometimes used for building Octave Forge packages).

This snapshot includes the new experimental OpenGL-based graphics
code, but the gnuplot backend is used by default.  Assuming you have
all the required libraries and have built the OpenGL bits properly,
you should be able to switch to the new backend with the command

  backend ("fltk");

PLEASE DO NOT REPORT THAT AXES LABELS AND OTHER TEXT OBJECTS ARE NOT
DISPLAYED WITH THE NEW GRAPHICS BACKEND.  Although the FTGL library is
detected and linked, it is not yet used to actually put text on the
plot window.  We could use a few more hands to help with implementing
that...

jwe