Release Plans

[John W. Eaton]

I would like to aim for making a new stable release by the end of
June (this year).

My goals are listed below.  If there are other significant items that
should be addressed, then post them here.  But I would like to keep
the list short so that we have the best chance of making a release in
finite time.

  * A working GUI enabled by default

    - Most necessary features are implemented.  The focus now needs to
      be more on fixing problems with the features that are implemented
      and less on adding more features.

    - QtHandles.  It would be nice to have the windows that wrap the 

    - uigetfile.  We have a version that uses FLTK.  We should have one
      that uses Qt to match the rest of the GUI dialog functions.

  * Improved performance for fread and fwrite, at least for common cases
    when no data conversion is required.  I've done some work on this
    job, but it needs to be finished.

  * There are some problems that need to be addressed to improve support
    for 64-bit indexing.

    - We use "long int" to pass 64-bit index values to HDF5 routines and
      that fails on Windows becuase "long int" is 32-bits wide.

    - We need to revise Octave's binary file format so that it can save
      dimensions as 64-bit quantities.

  * Release with Java enabled by default.  The JVM is not loaded
    unless it is needed, so having Java enabled by default should not
    cause trouble for users unless they actually want to try using
    some Java functions.  The only exception is that the dialog
    functions attempt to use Java if the Qt versions are not
    available, but I think that will be a tiny minority of users.

  * Release with the JIT compiler disabled by default.  The JIT
    compiler does not currently compile very many things but a bug in
    the way it compiles and executes a loop would be bad for many
    users.  I also don't think it has had the testing it needs to be
    considered ready for release.

jwe