OctConf 2018, second day -- a lot of discussions and some work done

[Carnë Draug]

Hi everyone

For those that couldn't come today, we continue to keep you informed
of what's going on OctConf.  Here's a short report of today's meeting.

We got some work done in the morning, of special interest the merging
of two GSoC projects: Michele Ginesi work in special functions, and
Cristiano Dorigo on improving iterative methods.

In the afternoon we had plenty of discussion.  Notes were added to the
wiki as discussions happened [1] but for a short report in email, the
main things are that:

  1) future changes in Octave C++ codebase will have to be paired with
  corresponding doxygen documentation;

  2) core will start to include a subset of packages, the first of
  which will be for statistics.

There was also plenty of discussion about better supporting external
Octave packages.  We added the option to install packages from
external URI via pkg so things like this will now work:

    pkg install https://bitbucket.org/KaKiLa/gpml/downloads/gpml-4.0.0.tar.gz

[1] https://wiki.octave.org/OctConf_2018_Notes#Tuesday
[2] http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/ca43264971ea