Variable editor does not seem to work

[kupiqu]

The variable editor does not seem to work, but I'm not sure this is something related to the flatpak package or to Octave itself

[kupiqu]

I think that makes sense...

Btw, will the flatpak package stay with stable releases once 4.4 is released?

[kupiqu]

Very nice!

[mtmiller]

The variable editor is indeed very new, and still has a lot of ongoing work. I don't test it often, but I just ran the current 4.3dev and the panel is blank for me, is that what you see? When I then run something like

x = 12
openvar x

I get a panel showing the x array.

If the variable editor is important to you and you can help test or improve it, I think help would be welcome upstream, I'd be happy to point you to the people working on it and open issues.

[kupiqu]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the information.

I typically use Octave 4.2.1 (installed from the deb repo that you maintain at launchpad).

I recently discovered this flatpak package and wanted to test. It works very nicely in my system actually (I may use it in a regular basis once Octave 4.4 is released). I only found 3 issues so far: missing documentation (issue #5), no globalmenu (fixed already via upstream KDE flatpak libs update, issue #6), and this one with the variable editor (I can see exactly as you say, blank panel, and I can reproduce what you reported using openvar).

To be frank, I am not that interested in the variable editor as a final user (not exactly my kind of workflow), I was curious about it. But sure, I'd be happy to test and report issues upstream if that would help...

[mtmiller]

Cool, so it looks like the flatpak build isn't breaking the variable editor in any case.

I am hopeful that the flatpak build of 4.4 will be a success and users can start relying on that and basically eliminate the need for the PPA.

[kupiqu]

I agree!

I'm closing this issue now, since the issue with the variable editor is not related to flatpak packaging but due to ongoing upstream work...

[kupiqu]

I'm opening this issue again after reading your email in Octave Maintainers Mailing List, as I cannot trigger the variable editor by clicking on a variable in the workspace table (neither it works by right clicking, and then, open in variable editor).

[kupiqu]

I also see another issue of the Variable Editor with row vectors. Instead of element values I see #VAL. This doesn't seem to happen in column vectors or matrices.

All #VAL values are replaced by their actual value once one of these #VAL elements is replaced by any value within the Variable Editor.

Mike, could you please try to reproduce?

[mtmiller]

@kupiqu cannot repro here, anything specific about the row vector?

x = rand (1, 100);
openvar x

looks ok to me.

[kupiqu]

mmm, funny enough this works for me too.

please try with x = 1:3, it actually seems related to the use of colon, somehow...

x = [1,2,3] works just fine as well

EDIT: I meant colon, not semicolon

[kupiqu]

Also, x = 1:3 doesn't work properly but x = [1:3] does

[mtmiller]

x = 1:3
openvar x

also works fine for me.

Ok, I think your build of Octave from flathub is older than d2467914ce33, which is the revision at which support was added for "range" types in the variable editor (a few weeks ago).

A range type is an expression like 1:10. If you surround it with square brackets (the concatenation operator), it's converted from a range into a normal matrix.

The #VAL string is a placeholder for the base class of Octave types, so any type that hasn't been made compatible yet with the variable editor will show this.

[kupiqu]

I see.

[kupiqu]

I'm opening this issue again after reading your email in Octave Maintainers Mailing List, as I cannot trigger the variable editor by clicking on a variable in the workspace table (neither it works by right clicking, and then, open in variable editor).

Perhaps this was also fixed in commits after the flatpak packaging...

[kupiqu]

Excellent, thank you

[kupiqu]

I didn't test it yet, but you did, so yes, let's close it :)