Octave graphics public archive

[Michael Goffioul]

Hi all,

Thanks to Thomas, there's now a mercurial public archive dedicated
to graphics development. The URL is http://hg.tw-math.de/octave-graphics.
This archive has been created to allow people to test the current work
going on in the graphics area and possibly to contribute. I encourage
anyone that is interested in graphics stuffs to give it a try.

The development is threefold
1) enhancement of existing graphics/property code
2) OpenGL (and probably FreeType) based renderer, mainly
inherited from JHandles and octplot
3) FLTK based reference backend using the above renderer

I personally also develop in parallel a Java-based backend, also
inherited from JHandles. The is not yet publicly available, but
I can send it to anyone who request it.

Please also pay attention to the following remarks:
- This is work-in-progress, which is implicitly unstable and might
not compile on your platform (although it is tested on Windows/MSVC
and Linux/gcc). It might screw up your computer and even destroy
the whole universe
- The code is not fully in sync with the regular octave archive: we
do a synchronization from time to time, but not on a regular basis
- This is definitely NOT a fork of octave, but simply a development
branch. In the end, the goal is to integrate the results in main
octave archive (probably with some adaptations). For the time
being, nothing has been integrated in main octave yet.
- There are only 2 developers that have write access to the archive:
Shai and I. If you want to contribute some code, a changeset is
the preferred way. If you want to be actively involved in the
development and have write access, please tell us (the idea
is of course not to give write-access to everyone, there must
be some kind of motivation...)
- This development archive is dedicated to graphics stuff ONLY.
Any other code should follow the normal way and be posted here
for review (and intgration by John). It will eventually end up in
the graphics archive on the next synchronization.

Have fun.

Michael (on behalf of Shai and I)