io-2.4.13 released

[Philip Nienhuis]

Hi,

There's a new release of the io package, io-2.4.13 [1]
It's primarily a bug fix release.

Please see the NEWS for what this new release brings [2]


For the Octave maintainers ML here's some extra info on the next plans 
for the io package, motivated by a question by Markus Muetzel about the 
status of the plans for moving spreadsheet I/O + XML functions to core 
Octave, partly or completely.

Well, whether that will ever happen, let alone whether it is still 
desired, is beyond me. Yet I do want to adapt the spreadsheet I/O 
functions code base to a much more easily maintainable status. A benefit 
is that it'll make it easier to move them to core some day, maybe.

An important part is merging the now largely separate ods????? and 
xls????? functions sets into just one xls????? function set and morphing 
the ods????? functions into wrappers for their xls????? counterparts and 
deprecate them. After all, Matlab's xlsread can perfectly read .ods 
these days and we do want to be compatible.
This way a lot of duplicate code can be eliminated.

A next step might be splitting up the OCT interface .xlsx and maybe .ods 
private functions into smaller dedicated pieces. However, .xlsx and .ods 
are very complicated file formats so maintaining these functions still 
won't be easy peasy.

Another wish is to adapt the current test scripts (a.o., test_spsh.m) to 
"regular" BIST tests as much as possible. More on that once I get there.

I'll plan to start a 2.6.x branch for these developments soon.

Anyway, enjoy.

Philip

[1] https://octave.sourceforge.io/io/index.html
[2] https://octave.sourceforge.io/io/NEWS.html