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NEWS.5.md

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Summary of bugs fixed for version 5.2.0 (2020-01-31):

See: https://www.octave.org/news/release/2020/01/31/octave-5.2.0-released.html

For (bug #XXXXX) see https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?XXXXX

Improvements

  • Lock amd and symbfact to avoid segmentation fault with SuiteSparse (bug #57435)
  • Fix segfault when calculating patch vertex normals (bug #57353)
  • Fix segfault in constructing patch normals for lighting (bug #57353)
  • mat2str.m: Fix for logical matrix (add transpose).
  • improve file equality check for MS Windows (bug #55161)
  • ismember.m: Fix second return argument when values are complex (bug #52437)
  • findobj.m: Fix typo and correctly handle numeric properties (bug #57030)
  • Correctly display integer types with format hex (bug #56966)
  • Cast winqueryreg REG_DWORD types to DWORD (bug #56703)
  • Fix numerous errors in audiowrite / audioread (bug #56889)
  • print.m: Pass quoted path to octave-svgconvert (bug #56768)
  • dir.m: Fix occasionally returning incorrect folder field (bug #55448)
  • Stop segfault when calling 3-input form of diag with cell arrays (bug #56711)
  • improve message for setting breakpoint in nonexistent function (bug #56157)
  • Use framebuffer object for printing invisible Qt figures on mac (bug #55268)
  • Escape backslash characters in EPS output (bug #56448)
  • Use replacement characters to display non UTF-8 strings in figures (bug #55974)
  • inputrc: Add warning about modification (bug #56079)
  • documentation.cc (global_search): just return if query string is empty (bug #56388)
  • Default (c)transpose for old style class arrays (bug #56323)
  • Always reserve at least 1 element of storage for sparse matrices (bug #56232)
  • Don't segfault at exit after reading malformed HDF5 file (bug #56149)
  • Fix pause() with no arguments called on Windows (bug #55943)
  • refactor minimum eigenvalue index search in qp (bug #56037)
  • qp: fix obscure corner case when calculating qp caused by a typo (bug #56037)
  • use std::streampos instead of std::ios::streampos (patch #9782).
  • fix pause and kbhit with glibc 2.28 end-of-file state behavior (bug #55029)
  • Fix return of left-handed vectors when inputs are complex (bug #56026)
  • waitbar.m: Fix hang when using createcancelbtn property (bug #55963)
  • shading.m: Fix unexpected error when multiple hggroups present (bug #55993)
  • dec2base.m: Correctly handle zero matrix input (bug #56005)
  • eliminate duplicate graphics callback object stack (bug #55908)
  • Improve performance when closing figures (bug #55908)
  • Reduce time to process pkg -forge list by 30X (bug #39479)
  • Feed fig2dev with PDF files converted from svg (bug #55906)
  • Improve error checking for iconv_open.
  • poly.m: fix the fix for input of complex conjugate pairs (bug #53897)
  • mkoctfile: use the TMPDIR environment variable if set (bug #55814)
  • line.m: Fix creation of unwanted axes (bug #55840)
  • Accept 4-input form for quiver3 (bug #55570)
  • pkg.m: restore installing packages from zip archives (bug #55788)
  • axis.m: Fix issues with equal argument (bug #55619, bug #55614, bug #55574, bug #55514, bug #54848, bug #53724, bug #53504, bug #53336, bug #51938, bug #50356).
  • ordeig.m: Do not fail on 1x1 matrices (bug #55779)

GUI

  • fix editors search and replace in selection (bug #56405)
  • undo a complete replace all action in the editor (bug #56405)
  • fix missing unlock of mutex when gui editor is not present (bug #56097)
  • prevent unnamed editor tab from being closed by rmdir (bug #55888)
  • prevent editor from closing files that are not affected by rmdir (bug #55823)
  • fix creating keyword files for editor autocompletion (bug #55835)
  • fix dock widget position when being dragged out of the main window (bug #55704)

Build system / Tests

  • configure: prevent overlinking when SUNDIALS is disabled (bug #55956)
  • use QtCore and Qt5Gui modules instead of Qt5OpenGL (bug #55735)
  • make building with Qt4 QGLWidget work again (bug #55735)
  • build: adapt mk-qthelp.pl to changes in Texinfo 6.7.
  • BIST should not rely on the current directory to be writable.
  • bp-table.cc: Fix test.
  • maint: Make old style class tests Matlab compatible.
  • Add BIST tests for unlink (bug #56097)

Documentation

  • fix many spelling errors (bug #57613)
  • help: improve documentation for the startup.m user script.
  • avoid conflict with @seealso macro in Texinfo 6.6 (bug #55952)
  • mk-doc-cache.pk: Also translate @seealso here. (bug #55952)
  • __makeinfo__.m: Also translate @seealso here (bug #55952)
  • polar.m: Document that input is expected to be in radians (bug #57052)
  • gallery.m: Fix typo in docstring for poisson (bug #56267)
  • Add 1024x1024 Octave logo icon (bug #55836)
  • add .editorconfig for default file encoding and indentation.
  • octave.doap: Copy localized (short) description over from appdata (bug #55279)
  • org.octave.Octave.appdata.xml: Add German and French description (bug #55279)
  • languages/*.ts: updated language files (bug #55772)
  • quiver3.m: Fix texinfo typo in docstring from cset f7b10bd40045.
  • doc: fix . Operator Index entry to build with Texinfo 6.7.
  • doc: improve example of using global variables from oct-files.
  • doc: Create en-dashes and em-dashes correctly in documentation.
  • doc: expand page_output_immediately doc string, mention page_screen_output.
  • doc: Clarify documentation of history_file (bug #57027)
  • doc: Improve documentation for get_help_text, get_help_text_from_file.
  • doc: Add documentation for GNUTERM variable used with gnuplot (bug #56906)
  • doc: Improve contour docstring example (bug #56849)
  • doc: Add example to show limitations of the given BLAS integer size.
  • doc: Improve documentation of sparse functions.
  • doc: Improve spelling of bicgstab (bug #56812)
  • doc: Remove Map functions keys, values, remove from unimplemented list (bug #56718)
  • doc: Add function index entry for alias inverse (bug #56629)
  • add content rating declaration to AppStream metadata (bug #56466)
  • doc: Remove stray semicolons from pie, pie3 calling forms.
  • doc: Redo documentation for rats function.
  • doc: Specify position property for text objects is a three-element vector (bug #56303)
  • doc: state that Octave can only load HDF5 files created by itself (bug #56148)
  • doc: Fix names of options in issorted (bug #56087)
  • doc: Small fixes to mat2cell and polyeig docstrings (bug #55985)
  • doc: Improve example code for using -pdflatexstandalone (bug #55945)
  • doc: Refer to "root object" rather than "root figure object".
  • doc: Place cross-reference from list of graphics object properties back to object (bug #46076)
  • doc: document the newline character in warning messages (bug #49158)
  • doc: pkg versions can be more general than "x.y.z" (bug #55798)

Summary of important user-visible changes for version 5 (2019-02-23):

See: https://www.octave.org/NEWS-5.1.html

General improvements

  • The Octave plotting system now supports high resolution screens, i.e., those with greater than 96 DPI which are referred to as HiDPI/Retina monitors.

  • Unicode character support for files and folders in Windows.

  • A new core function movfun will apply a function to a sliding window of arbitrary size on a dataset and accumulate the results. Many common cases have been implemented using the naming scheme movXXX where XXX is the function that will be applied. For example, the moving average over a dataset is movmean. New moving window functions:

    movfun movslice movmad movmax movmean movmedian movmin movprod movstd movsum movvar

  • The fsolve function has been tweaked to use larger step sizes when calculating the Jacobian of a function with finite differences. This leads to faster convergence.

  • The ranks function has been recoded for performance and is now 25X faster. In addition, it now supports a third argument that specifies how to resolve the ranking of tie values.

  • The function randi has been recoded to produce an unbiased (all results are equally likely) sample of integers. This may produce different results in existing code. If it is necessary to reproduce the exact random integer sequence as in previous versions use

      ri = imin + floor ((imax - imin + 1) * rand ());

  • The function isdefinite now returns true or false rather than -1, 0, or 1. To test for a positive semi-definite matrix (old output of 0) check whether the following two conditions hold:

    isdefinite (A) => 0 and isdefinite (A + 5*TOL, TOL) => 1

  • The intmax, intmin, and flintmax functions now accept a variable as input. Existing code to query the range of an existing variable can be simplified by removing the call to class that was previously required. For example defining the variable x = int8 (3) in the workspace, calls like

      range = [ intmin(class(x)), intmax(class(x)) ]

    can in Octave 5 be simplified to range = [ intmin(x), intmax(x) ].

  • The path handling functions no longer perform variable or brace expansion on path elements and Octave's load-path is no longer subject to these expansions.

  • A new printing device is available, "-ddumb", which produces ASCII art for plots. This device is only available with the gnuplot toolkit.

  • The msgbox function has changed in two respects: the default WindowStyle is now "non-modal", and the default interpreter for the message is now "tex". Both WindowStyle and Interpreter can be controlled by passing an option struct argument.

Dependencies

  • The GUI requires Qt libraries. The minimum Qt4 version supported is Qt4.8. Qt5 of any version is preferred.

  • The OSMesa library is no longer used. To print invisible figures when using OpenGL graphics, the Qt QOFFSCREENSURFACE feature must be available and you must use the qt graphics toolkit.

  • The FFTW library is now required to perform FFT calculations. The FFTPACK sources have been removed from Octave.

Matlab compatibility

  • The determination of an object's dimensions, size, and shape by the functions ndims, rows, columns, isscalar, isvector, isrow, iscolumn, ismatrix, and issquare now fully depends on the function size. Thus, any user-defined object can ensure correct treatment by the aforementioned functions by properly overloading the size function.

  • The functions issymmetric and ishermitian accept an option "nonskew" or "skew" to calculate the symmetric or skew-symmetric property of a matrix. Performance has also been increased.

  • The issorted function now uses a direction option of "ascend" or "descend". Change all uses of "ascending" and "descending" in existing code to the new options.

  • The strncmp and strncmpi functions now return true if the two input strings match, even though the number of characters specified by n exceeds the string length. For Example:

    strncmp ("abc", "abc", 100)

    returns true in Octave 5 and false in older versions of Octave.

  • The str2func function no longer accepts a second "global" argument. This argument was typically used to allow functions that accept function names as arguments to avoid conflicts with subfunctions or nested functions. Instead, it's best to avoid this situation entirely and require users to pass function handles rather than function names.

  • Using clear with no arguments now removes only local variables from the current workspace. Global variables will no longer be visible, but they continue to exist in the global workspace and possibly other workspaces such as the base workspace.

Nonlinear Equations

Several default solver options have been changed to be Matlab compatible. This may result in existing code producing different results.

  • fsolve

      Option         |   New Default    | Old Default
  ---------------|------------------|-------------
  FinDiffType    |    "forward"     |  "central"
  MaxFunEvals    | 100*length(x0)   |    Inf
  TolFun         |     1e-6         |    1e-7
  TolX           |     1e-6         |    1e-7
  Updating       |     "off"        |    "on"

  • fminsearch

      Option   | New Default | Old Default
  ---------|-------------|------------
  TolFun   |   1e-7      |   1e-4

  • fminbnd

      Option         | New Default | Old Default
  ---------------|-------------|------------
  MaxFunEvals    |     500     |   Inf
  MaxIter        |     500     |   Inf
  TolX           |    1e-4     |   1e-8

  • fminunc

      Option         |   New Default    | Old Default
  ---------------|------------------|------------
  FinDiffType    |   "forward"      | "central"
  MaxFunEvals    | 100*length(x0)   |   Inf
  TolX           |     1e-6         |   1e-7
  TolFun         |     1e-6         |   1e-7

Graphic objects

  • Figure graphic objects have a new property "Number" which is read-only and will return the handle (number) of the figure. However, if the property "IntegerHandle" has been set to "off" then the property will return an empty matrix [].

  • Patch and surface graphic objects now use the "FaceNormals" property for flat lighting.

  • "FaceNormals" and "VertexNormals" for patch and surface graphic objects are now calculated only when necessary to improve graphics performance. In order for any normals to be calculated the "FaceLighting" property must be set to "flat" (FaceNormals) or "gouraud" (VertexNormals), and a light object must be present in the axes.

  • The "Margin" property of text-objects has a new default of 3 rather than 2.

  • Printing to raster formats (bitmaps like PNG or JPEG) now uses an OpenGL-based method by default. The print options "-opengl" (raster) and "-painters" (vector) have been added ("qt" toolkit only). The figure property "renderer" specifies which renderer to use. When the property "renderermode" is "auto" Octave will select "-opengl" for a raster output format and "-painters" for a vector output format.

  • A new print option "-RGBImage" has been added which captures the pixels of a figure as an image. This is similar to screen capture tools, except that print formatting options can be used to, for example, change the resolution or display the image in black and white.

  • Two new print options for page-based formats (PDF, PostScript) have been added. The "-fillpage" option will stretch the plot to occupy the entire page with 0.25 inch margins all around. The "-bestfit" option will expand the plot to take up as much room as possible on the page without distorting the original aspect ratio of the plot.

  • Printing using the "-dtiff" output device will now create compressed images using LZW compression. To produce uncompressed images use the "-dtiffn" device.

Legacy functions

The following functions have been declared legacy functions which means they are obsolete and should not be used in any new code. Unlike deprecated functions, however, their removal from Octave has not yet been scheduled.

    Function              | Replacement
    ----------------------|------------------
    findstr               | strfind
    flipdim               | flip
    isdir                 | isfolder or dir_in_loadpath
    isequalwithequalnans  | isequaln
    isstr                 | ischar
    setstr                | char
    strmatch              | strncmp or strcmp
    strread               | textscan
    textread              | textscan

Deprecated functions and properties

The following functions and graphics properties have been deprecated in Octave 5 and will be removed from Octave 7 (or whatever version is the second major release after 5):

  • Functions

      Function                 | Replacement
  -------------------------|-------------------
  output_max_field_width   | output_precision
  is_keyword               | iskeyword

  • Graphics properties

      Object           | Property      | Value
  -----------------|---------------|------------
  text             | fontangle     | "oblique"
  uibuttongroup    | fontangle     | "oblique"
  uicontrol        | fontangle     | "oblique"
  uipanel          | fontangle     | "oblique"
  uitable          | fontangle     | "oblique"

  • Specifying legend position with a numeric argument is deprecated. Use a string argument instead.

  • The environment variable used by mkoctfile for linker flags is now LDFLAGS rather than LFLAGS. LFLAGS is deprecated, and a warning is emitted if is used, but it will continue to work.

Removed functions and properties

The following functions and properties were deprecated in Octave 4.2 and have been removed from Octave 5.

  • Functions

      Function             | Replacement
  ---------------------|------------------
  bitmax               | flintmax
  mahalanobis          | mahal in Octave Forge statistics pkg
  md5sum               | hash
  octave_config_info   | __octave_config_info__
  onenormest           | normest1
  sleep                | pause
  usleep               | pause
  wavread              | audioread
  wavwrite             | audiowrite

  • Properties

      Object      | Property          | Value
  ------------|-------------------|---------
  axes        | xaxislocation     | "zero"
              | yaxislocation     | "zero"
  hggroup     | erasemode         |
  image       | erasemode         |
  line        | erasemode         |
  patch       | erasemode         |
  patch       | normalmode        |
  surface     | erasemode         |
  surface     | normalmode        |
  text        | erasemode         |

Alphabetical list of new functions added in 5

  • clearvars
  • isfile
  • isfolder
  • matlab.lang.makeUniqueStrings
  • matlab.lang.makeValidName
  • movegui
  • movfun
  • movie
  • movmad
  • movmax
  • movmean
  • movmedian
  • movmin
  • movprod
  • movslice
  • movstd
  • movsum
  • movvar
  • openfig
  • ordeig
  • savefig
  • uitable

Old release news