Re: Merging new audio functionality into Octave

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On Tue, 2013-10-01 at 09:34 -0400, Mike Miller wrote:
> I'm interested to hear how the maintainers feel about merging the new
> audio functionality that was developed for GSoC into Octave.

More generally, I think we should start merging in *all* of our GSoC
code. It doesn't look like we failed any student who coded throughout
GSoC, so we should take this as an indication that we consider their
contributions viable.

> The work that was done includes audio file I/O and sound card I/O.
> 
> I think that the new modules are reasonably functional, but could
> definitely benefit from more testers, especially on Mac and Windows.
> In particular, I would be excited to see it merged in before the next
> major release, but I understand if the consensus is that it's not
> ready or that there's not enough time to make it ready before the
> release.

I'm definitely in favour of this. Somewhat working audio in some
platforms is better than completely broken audio on all platforms.

> Here's what I know of that definitely needs to be fixed in that
> development branch before I'd consider it ready to merge into the
> official repo:
> 
>   * Commit message cleanup (wrap long lines, set hg.user to real
>     name and email)

Do you need any help with this? While we're editing history, we might
as well also rebase it and hide a few merge commits. I don't mind
looking at merge commits, but almost everyone else seems to.

Vytautas, are you happy helping us do this?

> A --enable-audio option could be added if we want to treat this as an
> experimental disabled-by-default feature for one release cycle.

I say it should be enabled by default, unless it breaks compilation on
most systems.

- Jordi G. H.