Octave 3.0?

[John W. Eaton]

On 23-Mar-2007, David Grohmann wrote:

| with 2.9.10 coming soon

Later today, I hope.  I'm preparing it now.  It will first be listed
as the development version on the download page, then if there are no
serious bugs reported, it will become the "testing" version (and I
guess at that time, we could move 2.1.73 to "stable" in place of
2.0.17).  If there are serious bugs reported, then we can make 2.9.11
fairly soon.

| are there any specific goals for 3.0?

I think it is time to consider a feature freeze in preparation for
3.0.  So until the release, I plan to try to include only "safe"
changes.  The main things I would like to see for 3.0 are

  * Documentation improved.  I don't think it is absolutely necessary
    to fully document everything before 3.0 is released, but it would
    be good to remove obsolete portions of the manual and at least get
    some of the new features documented.

  * Update the FAQ.

  * Deal with any pending fixes for building Octave on Windows
    systems.  It would be great if we could have Octave binaries built
    for Cygwin, MinGW and MSVC.

  * Bugs fixed (as always).

For a trip back in time, see this posting:

  http://velveeta.che.wisc.edu/octave/lists/octave-maintainers/2005/256

in which I expressed some surprise that it had been two years since
first posting a list of things to do for Octave 3.0.  Now that it has
been another two years and most of the things on the list (and more)
have been done, I guess it is about time.

| I often see complaints about people still using 2.1.5x since that is the 
| "stable" build on the site.

Do you mean specifically the 2.1.50 binary for Windows?  That version
should not be listed anywhere as the "stable" version.  There are
newer versions available (even for Windows) so I think that is why you
see some frustration expressed here when we see that people are still
using such an obsolete version.

| As soon as you release 3.0 as stable You 
| should gain a much larger number of bug testers...

Will there also be a proportional increase in the number of bug
fixers?

jwe