> I have a pretty simple suggestion to get rid permanently of all these
> annoying behaviors (developed by unpaid people during their spare time) :
> don't use octave. Really, I mean it. After all the griefs you've exposed
> against octave and the dumbness of its developers, I don't understand why
> you're still using it.
Please don't use this argument. I've seen it used before, I understand
the exasperation, but it's still wrong. Once someone monopolizes the
niche for "free Matlab" on Google, they have some responsibility to
"humanity" (both as far as quality and as far as functionality).
In my (very personal) opinion, there are a few misconception in the above statement:
1) octave is not a monopoly, there are other alternatives available; moreover octave is GPL'ed, anybody is free to fork the code base and provide an alternate solution, as long as it is compatible with the GPL license
2) the octave community doesn't owe you anything, quality or functionality; the software is provided as-is, if it doesn't fulfill your need, well, too bad for you; the best you can do then is to help the community to make it better
In practice, anybody who's asked for help with courtesy has always be treated politely. But the fact is that we're mostly a community of unpaid developers who are students or have their own job, a family, a social life... so it's not always possible to meet everybody's expectation. And keeping complaining and insulting the developers is useless (actually, it has exactly the opposite effect). My reasoning is actually very simple: if you think a piece of software is a steaming pile of crap and their developers are a bunch of idiots, why would you use it?
Michael.