Re: Final call for bug reports

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 10/15/2013 09:55 AM, Rik wrote:
> The release cycle for Octave 3.8 is underway.  Before releasing we want to
> identify, and fix, any critical bugs.  If you have encountered odd behavior
> with the development version of Octave, but haven't found time to file a
> report on our bug tracker (bugs.octave.org), now is the time to do so.  The
> deadline for new submissions is tomorrow, Wednesday Oct. 16th.  After that
> we will begin reviewing which reports absolutely must be
> fixed before the release.  We can't guarantee your report will be included,
> but we also can't fix what we don't know about.

I'm pressed for time, but here's a short list of bugs/mods I've come 
across recently:

1) I see this at startup quite often.

HDF5: infinite loop closing library

D,T,F,FD,P,FD,P,FD,P,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E,E

I'm not quite sure how to reproduce the issue, however.


2) The Editor has no "preferences".  Could a preferences option be added 
to the Editor "File" or "Edit" drop-down menu that jumps directly to the 
Editor or Editor Styles dialog box of the main window's preferences?


3) What are the default font settings?  My preference is a mono-space 
font, so I've chosen Liberation Mono 11 point as the Default and all 
other text types to have the Default font.  I felt that 9 point is kind 
of small for editing.  9 point suffices for the Octave output.  When the 
comments are not the same font as the rest of the code and nothing is 
mono-spaced, layout didn't look very organized.


4) Would it be possible to turn off the auto completion of commands when 
typing comment text?  That is, only have code completion on text that is 
potentially a command.  The editor knows enough that text after a % or # 
should be highlighted in green text, so I'm wondering if it might be 
pretty easy.


5) The copyright added to files created via "edit sample1.m" shouldn't 
be added.  Or the GNU copyright notice creation could be an input 
option, such "gnu", "gpl" or "license".  There is no reason that the 
code generated by a user should fall under the GPL or any other license. 
 It's the user's prerogative to release original code under a license. 
 Here is the text from the GPL:

"
How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs

If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest 
possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it 
free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.

To do so, attach the following ...
"


6) Multiplot mode doesn't seem to behave as well as it once did.  For 
example, after running freqz() and closing the figure and opening a new 
figure with "figure(#)", I see:

> > figure(3)
multiplot>
               ^
           line 0: function to plot expected


7) In the list of children associated with a figure, I'm trying to 
determine which is an axes and which is a legend.  Try the following 
commands:

figure(10)
x = [1:50]
h = plot(x)
legend(h, 'this is x');
kids = get(gcf, 'Children')
get(kids(1))
[snip]
    tag = legend
    type = axes
[snip]
get(kids(2))
[snip]
    tag =
    type = axes
[snip]

It's as though the "tag" for the legend actually should be the "type" 
variable value.  There shouldn't be a tag there unless the user 
specifies one.  This may have been introduced somewhere around the 
following changeset: 
http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/d99785217634


8) Users are not going to like the debugger lines displayed in the 
terminal area.  It takes up valuable space that can be used for 
displaying variables between breakpoints and generally just makes 
comprehension that much more difficult because of how busy the window 
appears.  To me, the lines of debug text in the command window are 
extraneous.  All that information is available inherently with the new 
GUI-based debugger.

Dan