Re: Moving ode changes to default branch

[c.]

On 14 Oct 2016, at 19:51, Rik <address@hidden> wrote:

> The correlation between length of testing and number of bugs found is
> positive.  It doesn't guarantee that any specific bug will be found.  Let
> me re-state and say "more confident" this would be caught.  As it is now,
> the code has only been in Mercurial for 8 days, with a bug found on day 1. 
> That feels like development code, not stable code.

That is one point I wanted to discuss in more detail.

The bug was not introduced by the more "invasive" changes but by a supposedly 
trivial (but actually not that much it seems ...) fix for a bug that Jacopo 
had discovered at last minute which is discussed in this thread:

http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Default-merged-to-stable-for-upcoming-4-2-release-td4679934.html#a4679999

That fix was meant to allow supporting an obscure, undocumented and deprecated
matlab feature that had probably never been used by anyone in Octave and 
therefore had
not been tested.

As you see from that thread I even suggested dropping that feature alltogether
but after discussion on the list we agreed to keep it, only then I applied the 
patch.

Unfortunately the patch contained a mistake, but that was quickly fixed.

Even though this change was applied at last minute, I wouldn't call it 
"unstable code",
it is a fix for a bug that happened to require two attempts before being done 
correctly ...

c.