OctConf 2012 comments and questions

[Mike Miller]

I wanted to ask some questions and comment on some of what I've been
reading about OctConf 2012. Very sorry I couldn't make this, it looks
like a lot got discussed and a lot of great developments are under
way.

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 12:44 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> I would be interested if other people
> shared their thoughts too, by whatever means they prefer.
> [...]
>     http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/octconf-2012-report/

So, FWIW, here are my thoughts and questions, as a non-attendee.

> The Octave GUI by Jacob Dawid

I just started looking at the GUI a day or two ago, very impressive so
far. I agree with others that this will go a long way towards bringing
in new users that are intimidated by the command-line. And the
similarity to another program that some people are familiar with will
help too. I'm intimately familiar with Qt so I skipped most of the Qt
backgrounder, but the material on communicating with Octave and the
thread model is great reference.

Is the plan to eventually integrate OpenGL plotting capability into the GUI?

Will there eventually be a single octave binary that runs both
command-line and GUI modes, similar to emacs?

> Agora Octave and Packaging by Carlo de Falco, David Pinto and Juan Pablo 
> Carbajal.

I'm very interested in where this is going. The slides leave a lot to
the imagination :) Is there a more detailed explanation of what this
is about, or can one of you write something up? I'd be interested in
what this means for the future of packages, user contributions, and
the roles of Agora and OctaveForge.

> OctConf will now take place annually

This is a really good idea to keep the community invigorated and active.

> Have a public list of release goals, editable only by project admins.

This is something I've been meaning to suggest for a while. I think
Octave really needs a roadmap, release goals, and a release schedule,
either calendar-based or feature-based. I haven't been doing this for
very long, but I do not really have a clear picture of where the
project is going, what are some specific things to work on for the
next release, etc. I think this would go a long way towards keeping
developers motivated and providing a reference to easily see what are
the most important things to be working on.

Responses and comments welcome.

-- 
mike