This directory contains development releases of Octave.

If you want a stable, well-tested version of Octave, you should be
looking at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave.

Development releases are provided for people who want to help test,
debug, and improve Octave.  Very little testing is done before making
the development releases and they may even be made when Octave is in
an inconsistent state.  It is possible that you will encounter a
very obvious bug, such as a failure to compile on *any* machine.  It is
likely that such bugs will be fixed by the next development release,
so it really isn't necessary to report them unless they persist over
more than one release.

Please DO report other bugs in the development releases as soon as you
find them.  Bugs should be reported to the bug tracker at
'http://bugs.octave.org'.  Please read read the bug reporting
guidelines (http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/bugs.html) before
submitting an item.

If you have a fix for a bug, or an enhancement to submit, send your
patch to maintainers@octave.org or submit it to the patch
tracker at 'http://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?group=octave'. 

By adhering to the following guidelines you can minimize the work that
Octave maintainers need to do to apply your patch.  Maintaining Octave
is a lot of work in the best of circumstances, and we can't keep up
unless you do your best to help.

   * Send an explanation with your changes of what problem they fix or
     what improvement they bring about.  For a bug fix, just include a
     copy of the bug report, and explain why the change fixes the bug.

   * Always include a proper bug report for the problem you think you
     have fixed.  We need to convince ourselves that the change is
     right before installing it.  Even if it is right, we might have
     trouble judging it if we don't have a way to reproduce the problem.

   * Include all the comments that are appropriate to help people
     reading the source in the future understand why this change was
     needed.

   * Don't mix together changes made for different reasons.  Send them
     _individually_.

     If you make two changes for separate reasons, then we might not
     want to install them both.  We might want to install just one.

   * Use `diff -c' to make your diffs.  Diffs without context are hard
     for us to install reliably.  More than that, they make it hard for
     us to study the diffs to decide whether we want to install them.
     Unified diff format is better than contextless diffs, but not as
     easy to read as `-c' format.

     If you have GNU diff, use `diff -cp', which shows the name of the
     function that each change occurs in.

   * Write the change log entries for your changes.

     Read the `ChangeLog' file to see what sorts of information to put
     in, and to learn the style that we use.  The purpose of the
     change log is to show people where to find what was changed.  So
     you need to be specific about what functions you changed; in
     large functions, it's often helpful to indicate where within the
     function the change was made.

     On the other hand, once you have shown people where to find the
     change, you need not explain its purpose.  Thus, if you add a new
     function, all you need to say about it is that it is new.  If you
     feel that the purpose needs explaining, it probably does--but the
     explanation will be much more useful if you put it in comments in
     the code.

     If you would like your name to appear in the header line for who
     made the change, send us the header line.

If you would like to be on the very sharpest part of the bleeding
edge, you can now use Mercurial to access Octave's current development
sources.  Instructions for checking out a copy are available on the
web at http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html.

Last updated: Sat Jan 22 21:26:18 PST 2011