Differences between Octave 2.1.7x and 2.9.x

[Matthias Brennwald]

Dear all,

is there a list of the differences between Octave 2.1.7x and 2.9.x?

I recently upgraded from 2.1.72 to 2.9.9 (running under Mac OS X  
10.4). I am quite annoyed by the fact that my code does not work as  
expected anymore. For instance, '__gnuplot_set__' and 'mesh' seem to  
behave differently (at least my plotting routines are broken), and I  
had to rewrite my startup file because the behavior of 'path' command  
changed. I guess there are many more changes that I didn't find yet.  
In other words: I am pretty sure my code is broken with 2.9.x, but I  
don't know how and where. How can I find out what has changed?

I guess most of the changes from 2.1.7x to 2.9.x were made to improve  
the compatibility with Matlab. At the same time, however, Octave is  
not compatible with itself anymore! Also, it seems to me that these  
changes were made out of the blue (which, I hope, is not the case!).  
Before changing commands, the user should at least be notified or  
warned when using commands that will (potentially) change in the  
future. One may argue that 2.9.x should be considered as a test  
version, and that I therefore shouldn't be complaining, which is  
propably right. Yet, I guess the changes will make it into version  
3.0, which MUST therefore come with a complete list of changes. And  
please don't hide this list anywhere deep in the heap of the files  
coming with Octave. How about an online history whose URL is  
displayed during the startup of Octave?

Matthias

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Matthias Brennwald
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