Re: Keeping the gui-release branch open considered harmful

[John W. Eaton]

On 01/30/2015 12:15 PM, Rik wrote:

> Another downside is that the current development branch has the
> accumulated non-GUI bug fixes for Octave, but it also brings with it
> classdef which has not been significantly tested.  For example,
>
> strfind ("strfind.cc", "cc")
> error: invalid meta.package indexing

I wasn't aware of that.  I had hoped that classdef wouldn't cause 
trouble if it wasn't being used.

> I think doing any significant testing of classdef, perhaps asking people
> to try classdef code they have written on the development branch, would
> delay a release too far into the future.

I don't expect that classdef will be 100% functional for 4.0.  We could 
possibly have a warning about that.

> A simpler solution might be to backport important bug fixes using either
> hg graft or hg transplant.  There are about 222 of these to review.
>
> hg log -r a1e4282f5254: -b dev -k 'bug #' | grep 'changeset:' | wc -l
>
> The focus of 4.0 is a GUI with Windows support so bugs related to
> display, Windows incompatibilities, and plotting output would be the
> ones I would backport.

222 bug fixes seems like a lot to graft and review.  I expect many 
conflicts in that process.  Plus all the changes related to graphics and 
even the GUI that went on default but were not strictly bug fixes.

jwe