Octave 3.3.92 snapshot available for ftp

[John W. Eaton]

I'm making one more snapshot/test release before 3.4.  Unless any
serious new regressions are reported, something very similar to this
snapshot will be released as 3.4, probably late Monday or early
Tuesday, US Eastern time.


A new snapshot of Octave is now available from alpha.gnu.org in the
directory /gnu/octave (note this is different from the location of
previous snapshots):

  5164bd1ae48041b3d997e400a9aa57c3  octave-3.3.91-3.3.92.patch.bz2
  8e7bfcd261c770253562b6d89f8c9b6e  octave-3.3.91-3.3.92.patch.gz
  714a7737b044edce178d499d9525ca92  octave-3.3.92.tar.bz2
  bc7f3ac8f098a2a2bab9619c370ad7d8  octave-3.3.92.tar.gz

  -rw-r--r-- 1 1003 65534   314120 Feb 06 12:24 octave-3.3.91-3.3.92.patch.bz2
  -rw-r--r-- 1 1003 65534   323628 Feb 06 12:24 octave-3.3.91-3.3.92.patch.gz
  -rw-r--r-- 1 1003 65534 14630225 Feb 06 12:27 octave-3.3.92.tar.bz2
  -rw-r--r-- 1 1003 65534 17276958 Feb 06 12:30 octave-3.3.92.tar.gz

The snapshot is tagged in the usual way (ss-3-3-92) in the Mercurial
archive and will be marked as the "development" version of
Octave on the download page of the Octave web site.

Please remember that these snapshots are provided for testing
purposes.  I do not consider them to be Octave releases.  If people
think there will be confusion because of the version number, then we
can add a notice to the Octave startup message.  Changing the version
number to something like ss-2009-09-12 is not an option because it
will cause trouble with typical version comparison functions (for
example, that are sometimes used for building Octave Forge packages).

This snapshot includes the new experimental OpenGL-based graphics
code, but gnuplot is still used by default.  Assuming you have
all the required libraries and have built the OpenGL bits properly,
you should be able to switch to the new grahpics toolkit with the
command

  graphics_toolkit ("fltk");

Plots should mostly work, but there are still some problems.  If you
would like to see these graphics features improve at a more rapid
pace, please help with implementing the things you miss most.  We
would like to have "rundemos plot" working correctly before the next
major release.

Even if you have been building Octave regularly from the Mercurial
archive, it would help if you could build from the snapshot and report
any problems.

jwe