Moving spreadsheet I/O to core Octave

[John W. Eaton]

I'm moving this topic here from the help list.

On 6 May 2015 at 15:14:45 -0700 (PDT), Philip Nienhuis
<address@hidden> wrote:

> JWE only wants the spreadsheet I/O to go into core,
> and I'm not sure if that can be done completely.
> Some functionality can go over, some will have to
> remain in io due to incompatibility with licensing,
> too experimental or fragile code, or other limitations.
> As a result, smaller or larger parts of the io package
> will survive I think it'll happen with 4.2.0 at the
> earliest. With 4.0.0 on the doorstep I think there's
> no priority to pick this up.

If there are licensing issues for core Octave, then I suspect there are 
licensing issues for a package as well.  Since I must have missed this 
in the past, what exactly are the licensing problems?

Also, I don't like this argument of things being too experimental or 
whatever.  I think the xlsread/write functions belong in core Octave. 
Waiting until they are perfect before including them means they will 
never be included.  If we just put them in core, a lot more people will 
test them, look at them, and offer improvements.  That has always been 
my experience.  Look at the history of the GUI, QtHandles, the Java 
interface, and most recently, the audioread/write functions.  These all 
received much more attention and improved more rapidly after being 
included in core Octave.  I expect the same for xlsread/write.

I have a patch that is nearly ready for doing this job, but I don't 
think it is appropriate for 4.0 but it could certainly go on the default 
branch now.

jwe