Re: looking ahead to 3.6

[Søren Hauberg]

fre, 11 02 2011 kl. 15:16 -0500, skrev John W. Eaton:
> My goal is to cut the time between releases to 9-12 months, so that
> would mean starting the release process sometime in september this
> year.  If the release cycle is much longer than a year, then it seems
> to become difficult to make releases.  If they happen more frequently,
> maybe we won't pressure ourselves into trying for last minute
> perfection.

I think this is a very good idea.

>   * Make the current FLTK+OpenGL plotting system work better so that
>     we can make it the default.  For this to happen, there are a lot
>     of little bugs that need to be fixed, plus we need to make
>     printing reliable.  If possible, we need to make printing work
>     even when a plot is not displayed on the screen.

Could we just use gnuplot when a non-visible figure is being printed?
Sure, this would be sub-optimal, but it's better than the current
solution. The best solution would probably be to make a printing system
that is independent of the drawing system. Does anybody know of a
library that allows you to create postscript/svg/pdf/whatever files
showing 3D figures?

>   * Integrate a GUI with the core Octave distribution.  My preference
>     would be to start with OctaveDE since I think it is doing the
>     right thing by embedding Octave rather than communicating with
>     Octave using pipes.  I'm willing to consider other alternatives,
>     but it is important to me that we have a way to interact with
>     Octave's command line without needing to completely reinvent
>     readline.

>From what I understand OctaveDE provides class that allows you to create
an Octave widget and query things like variable sizes, etc. A first step
could be to incorporate that class into Octave. That would also allow
people to create nice plugins for editors (such as gEdit as was
discussed on this list very recently).

Personally, I think we should have an API for interacting with the
interpreter (determine if a line of code can be parsed, evaluate a line
of code, set debug break points, ...). I hate to say this, but I do
believe that reinventing readline is required if we actually want to
create a GUI with real value.

> Comments?  Additions?

Infrastructure. I'd like to see Octave and Octave-Forge move closer to
each other and actually merge at some point. The little time I have to
spend on Octave at the moment (I'm handing in my PhD thesis in about
half a year...) seems to be spend on boring behind-the-scene
infrastructure stuff for Octave-Forge. If I have to spend time on such
things, I'd rather help out both Octave and Octave-Forge at the same
time; that could be achieved if those projects were merged. Also, I
think it brings confusion to the picture to have two separate entrances
to the world of Octave.

Just a few thoughts from a guy that doesn't seem to contribute much at
the moment...
Søren