Re: Octave and Freemat

[David Bateman]

Sebastien Loisel wrote:
> Dear Octave maintainers,
> 
> Hello, it's been a while. I'm tinkering, in my spare time, with Freemat
> and I am looking to see which parts of Octave Forge can benefit Freemat.
> Right now, as a test, I want to copy orth.m into Freemat. It's a simple
> function with a simple implementation and only one parameter that always
> means the same thing.
> 
> I noticed that the copyright header says something like "This file is
> part of Octave..." Now, I don't want to usurp Octave's good name by
> claiming that Freemat is part of Octave, so what we're thinking of doing
> is to prepend a note, something like: "This file, which is distributed
> with Freemat, was originally copied from Octave; original copyright
> notice follows." Does that sound good?

That is an error, as the code on octave-forge is not part of Octave. The
copyright strings were recently updated in octave-forge and I believe
are in the latest octave-forge release from 2 weeks ago. Therefore base
any changes for FreeMat on those versions. Then you can just leave the
copyrights alone..

> A second issue is that for some files, I will probably be making some
> changes. Some changes are necessary for compatibility, for example,
> Freemat doesn't understand comments that start with ##, and expects
> comments to start with %. Other changes are improvements in
> functionality and compatibility with MATLAB, for instance, the roots in
> the version of Octave that came with my cygwin, crashed on roots([1e-200
> 1e200 1]), while the versions in MATLAB and the upcoming Freemat, have
> no problem with it.

This seems to be a bug and still exists.

> The Freemat developers have expressed the desire to have these
> improvements merged back into Octave-Forge. As a hobbyist, I'm not sure
> that I want to babysit both the Freemat side of things and the Octave
> side of things, but if someone wants to pick up the slack on the Octave
> side (or if someone else from Freemat volunteers), I would be happy to
> provide patches for Octave Forge.

roots is an octave core function and not from Octave forge, so send the
proposed patches to roots to address@hidden As for octave-forge
changes, those are easier to deal with as the acceptance process of
patches is easy.. Just send to the address@hidden list
and in generally you then commit the code yorself..

D.

> 
> I appreciate your comments,
> 
> -- 
> Sébastien Loisel
>