A new io release (1.0.15) has been sent to the package release forum.
Could a site admin please upload it on the OF site, please?


io-1.0.15 is primarily a bug fix release and a snapshot / wrap-up of 
current development status (some still a bit experimental).
It mainly comprises:


- A number of bug fixes (incl. a few serious ones, notably with .ods/OOo 
Calc);


- Some mainly cosmetic improvements to existing code; less verbosity;


- pch2mat (reading & transforming Nastran PCH files, contributed by B. 
Oytun Peksel);


- object2json.m (creating a json description string of objects, 
contributed by Daniel Torre). This was already silently introduced in 
io-1.0.14;


- A scripted troubleshooting / classpath setup tool for spreadsheet I/O 
support (chk_spreadsheet_support.m);


- Experimental OXS support (OpenXLS) for reading Excel xls (BIFF8).
OpenXLS is -let's say- a little bit lacking: For reading it is faster 
than JXL. However, while OXS write support has been coded (and works) I 
had to disable it as the OXS Java classes won't release the file handle 
so Octave will hang upon closing :-(
I'm stuck with this so I just release it as-is;


- Experimental UNO support, i.e. invoking OpenOffice.org (or clones like 
LibreOffice) behind the scenes to read spreadsheet files, much like 
ActiveX/COM for MS-Excel. This is also based on Java.

The first time you use UNO, OOo has to be loaded and you'll have to be 
patient, but once loaded (and in the OS cache) you'll see the pros:
   --* Blazingly fast;
   --* Much lower Java memory usage as OOo loads the spreadsheet in its 
own memory chunk (not Octave's) => much bigger spreadsheet capacity;
   --* You can read *all* formats supported by OOo: .ods, .xls, .csv, 
.xlsx, .sxc, .dbf, Lotus wk1, Quattro Pro, ......; and it doesn't really 
matter whether xlsopen of odsopen is used...

Of course all this wonderful stuff comes at a prize:
   --* After closing the spreadsheet file (odsclose, xlsclose) ALL OOo 
invocations will be closed, also those started outside Octave. This is 
due to "the way OpenOffice works" (quoted from OOo dev forum), 
especially through Java. There are other ways to close OOo but they'll 
hang Octave;
   --* The Java UNO classes supplied with e.g. LibreOffice aren't kept 
quite up-to-date with the main program. As a consequence, with e.g., 
LibreOffice 3.4 the main LO window will pop up (it can't be hidden). I 
filed a bug report for this 
(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40991) but I haven't seen 
it being picked up yet. Another example: while LO 3.3.1's row capacity 
was already > 10^6, it took until LO 3.4 before this capacity was 
implemented in the Java UNO classes.
Like with OXS, I'm a bit stuck here - all this has to be fixed upstream.


Hint:
for older Octave versions (< 3.4.0) you can install io-1.0.15 using the 
-nodeps flag. You'll then loose the old and buggy textread and 
csv/dlm-read/write functions but I'd consider that as no big loss.


Philip

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