Re: 4.3.90 release candidate

[Rik]

I just compiled on a vanilla Linux machine (Mint 18.1 based on Ubuntu 16.04).

I get no failures when running 'make check' so that is good.

Summary:

  PASS                            14853
  FAIL                                0
  XFAIL (reported bug)               31
  XFAIL (expected failure)            5
  SKIP (missing feature)            138
  SKIP (run-time condition)          12


I did notice the following things:

1) gnu+11 variant rather than straight C++11 dialect chosen by configure. 
I don't think we are taking advantage of any gnu++11 extensions so it
shouldn't be a problem on machines with g++.

 C++ compiler:                  g++ -std=gnu++11  -pthread -fopenmp  -Wall
-W -Wold-style-cast -Wformat -Wpointer-arith -Wwrite-strings -Wcast-align
-Wcast-qual -O2 -pipe
 
2) Extra space for FLTK variables in summary at end of configure

  FFTW3F libraries:              -lfftw3f_threads -lfftw3f
  FLTK CPPFLAGS:                  -I/usr/include/cairo
-I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/include
-I/usr/include/pixman-1 -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/libpng12
-I/usr/include/freetype2
  FLTK LDFLAGS:                   -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions
  FLTK libraries:                 -lfltk_gl -lfltk -lX11
  fontconfig CPPFLAGS:           -I/usr/include/freetype2

Not an issue, but why is it different from everything else?

3) Release Notes do not have date filled in.

Summary of important user-visible changes for version 4.4 (yyyy-mm-dd):

Maybe this is filled in only when the actual release is made, in which case
this is fine for the present.

4) README file sizes are incorrect

Octave requires approximately 1.4 GB of disk storage to unpack and
compile from source (significantly less, 400 MB, if you don't compile
with debugging symbols).  Once installed, Octave requires
approximately 350 MB of disk space (again, considerably less, 70 MB,
if you don't build shared libraries or the binaries and libraries do
not include debugging symbols).

For my build it was 468 MB and 73 MB without debugging.  I will rebuild
with debugging symbols and update the README file with correct values.

5) Generated language files which are probably static

  GEN      libgui/default-qt-settings
  GEN      libgui/languages/be_BY.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/ca_ES.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/de_DE.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/en_US.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/es_ES.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/eu_ES.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/fr_FR.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/it_IT.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/ja_JP.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/nl_NL.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/pt_BR.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/pt_PT.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/ru_RU.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/uk_UA.qm
  GEN      libgui/languages/zh_CN.qm

We ship the fully generated forms of the documentation so that users don't
have to have a full TeXinfo system installed.  Should we also be shipping
the compiled versions of the language files for Qt?  Maybe they did change
the internal binary representation between Qt4 and Qt5 so we can't
construct these until compile time.  But if this is not the case, then I
think it would be useful to distribute these files so users don't need to
install more tools around foreign language translation.

6) Java class files are generated, rather than shipped in the tarball.

  GEN      scripts/java/org/octave/ClassHelper.class
  GEN      scripts/java/org/octave/Matrix.class
  GEN      scripts/java/org/octave/OctClassLoader.class
  GEN      scripts/java/org/octave/Octave.class
  GEN      scripts/java/org/octave/OctaveReference.class

Same for jar file

  GEN      scripts/java/octave.jar

Isn't it the case that a compiled java file is just byte code that can be
read and run anywhere?  If that is correct then we could make these files
and just distribute them in the tarball.  However, if these really are part
of the JNI interface to C++ then maybe they do have to be generated on the
host computer at the same time Octave is built.

7) Java warnings during build

Note: org/octave/ClassHelper.java uses unchecked or unsafe operations.
Note: Recompile with -Xlint:unchecked for details.

There is already a bug report about this
(https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?53550).  I think newbie users are going to
be freaked out by this message, even though it appears to cause no trouble
at all.

--Rik