3.1 status report

[John W. Eaton]

Here is an update of the goals for 3.1 that I posted here:

  http://www.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/octave-maintainers/2007-December/005354.html

I've tagged completed items with an "X" and items for which some work
has been done with a "+".  Please let me know if I've missed anything.

   1. Objects:
        X Merge object-branch
        - Implementation of superiorto/inferiorto
        - Operator overloading vs. constant folding

   +. Handle block comments (not finished: block comments inside []
      or {}, and also in the group of comments following a
      continuation character, etc.  See the FIXME comments in lex.l).

   X. Eliminate __gnuplot_X__ functions from Octave

   4. Move code to external packages
        - control
        - finance
        - optimization?
        - signal?
        - statistics?
        - quaternions

   +. Move imread/imwrite functions from Octave Forge to Octave.

   +. Improve traceback error messages.  The messages should list the
      exact line where an error occurred, then only print function
      traceback info and not information about which
      if/for/while/etc. statement includes the error.  That extra
      information just seems to confuse users, and the current
      messages don't always clearly describe the actual location of
      the error.

   X. Ensure that all operations which work on dimensions alone
      (squeeze, numel, triu, etc.) work for all objects and preserve
      type.  Should these functions all be built-in?  Possibly they
      should all be provided by the octave_value class interface.

   X. Make mapper functions work like other built-in functions?

   X. Mapper functions like real, imag, and mod should preserve type
      (are there others?)

  10. Improve compatibility of fsolve
        - input/output args should be compatible
        - use optimset for options

  11. Graphics:
        + Refactor base_properties
        + Specific types for properties with improved property value
          checking
        - Implement the addprops function allow additional properties
          to objects
        - add the hggroup object that has no fixed properties for use
          by barseries, etc.
        - Add callback DeleteFcn/CreateFcn to objects
        - Allow listener functions to be added to objects
        + Clean separation of backend from property database
        + Implement experimental backend based on OpenGL and GUI
          toolkit

Is anyone interested in helping to move the control, finance, and
quaternion functions into separate packages?

Should we move the statistics, signal, and optimization functions to
separate packages?

I'm still hopeful that we can have a release within a month or two.
Although it may contain the OpenGL graphics code, I'm not expecting
that we will make that the default graphics backend.

Would someone like to work on an imwrite function?  I don't think the
current code in Octave Forge is what we want.  Instead, I think that
we should just use GraphicsMagick++ to write the file.  It should be
relatively easy to do that, but to make imwrite compatible requires a
bit of work to properly decode the type and size of the argument and
decide how to store the data in a Magick::Image object so that it can
be written to a file.

Another small but fairly important project is improving the
compatibility of fsolve.  Is anyone interested in working on that?

I hope to have some time to work on items 1, 2, and 6, but if someone
else would like to work on them, please let me know so we don't
duplicate efforts.

I'd also like to start making snapshots again starting this week.  Is
there any objection to doing that?  Unless someone has a better idea,
I was thinking of starting the series of snapshots with version 3.1.50
and making the next stable release 3.2.0.

Comments?

Thanks,

jwe