Re: Release Plans

[Michael D. Godfrey]

On 04/22/2013 03:31 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> I would like to aim for making a new stable release by the end of
> June (this year).
Very good!
> 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
Do you want FLTK to be the default graphics_toolkit?  If so, what about its
unconditional conversion of data to single precision?  To fix this the data
need to be rescaled as discussed in the bug report, or at least an error
generated if data overflow single range.

The JIT config check needs to be improved so that it does not try try
compile if the JIT version is > 3.1.  There is already a test for < 3.0.

Anyhow, it seems to me that this will be a GREAT release.

Michael