Compatibility with Scilab-5.x

From rtss

Despite what users might expect, porting the current stable RTSS (0.3.0) to Scilab-5.x is not a straightforward task. Infact, there are several incompatibilities between the two softwares, since RTSS-0.3.0 was designed for Scilab-4.1.2 and many changes have occurred between Scilab-4.1.2 and Scilab-5.x. Below is a short list of these changes, where the most significant ones for RTSS are shown. Please see Changes Scilab 5 for a complete list.

Toolboxes template

Scilab-5.x defines a new standard architecture for external contributions whose aim is to normalize how modules and toolboxes should be. As result, RTSS-0.3.0 installation procedure no longer works in Scilab-5.x. See Modules/toolboxes template for details.

Graphics

Graphic internals have been strongly modified in Scilab-5.x and there are some issues with RTSS' graphic routines now, since they was optimized for Scilab-4.1.2. See Graphics for further details.

Obsolete functions

Several functions used by RTSS-0.3.0 have become obsolete in Scilab-5.x, whereas some other behave slightly differently in some circumstances (e.g. string manipulation related routines). Therefore, all the Scilab code in RTSS must be reviewed. See Obsolete Scilab functions for a detailed list.

Scicos

Tcl/Tk features are still inactive, so the Pal Tree command is not working. However, there would be a lot of other things to say about this topic. Some infos are summarized in the section "Notes", below. See the references therein for additional details.

Online Help management

As of version 5, Scilab uses a strict subset of DocBook 5 for all its documentation. Some functions were previously used to build the Help sections of external contributions have been removed, and replaced by new ones. Therefore, the old Online Help building procedure no longer works. See Online Help management and the references therein for more info.

In order users can work with RTSS under Scilab-5.x, we first have to address the issues due to said changes. However, this is not going to happen shortly, primarily for the two following reasons:

1. it is not a short-time job and Scilab-5 has been far from being considered a stable product for a long time[a]. With Scilab-5.1, the situation has markedly improved[b], but it has been released on Feb.2009, so we started to work for a short time with it;
2. we worked on the first major upgrade of RTSS for a long time. We hope to release it soon and --at that time-- it will work with the old Scilab-4.1.2 and ScicosLab-4.3. As users can easily imagine, we're not interested in spending time and efforts to port RTSS-0.3.0 to Scilab-5: we prefer to port RTSS-1.x directly, when Scilab-5.x will definitely be a stable software.

Notes