Re: 4.0 release goals

[Israel Herraiz]

Excerpts from Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso's message of Thu Nov 01 19:31:17 +0100 
2012:
> My point being, GUI should be the biggest priority, let's stabilise it
> so we can make an awesome 4.0 splash.

I could try to help with this. I would start changing the workspace
and the history view.

One of the problems with the workspace is that it is being refreshed
constantly (with a delay of 0.5 sec I think). This can be a
performance issue in some environments. Last time I checked (months
ago), the workspace view could be accessed at the same time from two
different events, which is problematic. I would add a semaphore to
avoid touching the workspace view if it's being changed. Also, the
tree model associated to the view is buggy (I think). Sometimes it
returns NULL pointers to refer to elements of the tree that should not
be null. That causes segmentation faults. In the version of the GUI I
maintain, I changed the workspace to be plain, with a plain model. It
is much easier to maintain, and it has been very stable so far. I
could try to do these changes myself.

About the history view, although it does not refresh constantly, the
history is being updated constantly too. Sometimes, two events can try
to update the history commands lists at the same time. Again, I would
add a semaphore to avoid this.

I could probably help with the workspace and the history view. I guess
these two could be easily integrated with the current code, and would
probably help improve the stability of the GUI.

There are other minor things I have done with the version I maintain,
that could be easily integrated back in Octave (I am thinking of the
debugger for instance).

What's the roadmap for 4.0? I don't have a lot of time, but the
workspace and the history view could be done by the end of
December. Alternatively, I could help someone else to extract those
parts from my version and integrate them in Octave. I guess that would
be faster.

Cheers,
Israel