Re: Octave Central (or something like that)

[Paul Kienzle]

On Mar 8, 2007, at 6:24 PM, Søren Hauberg wrote:

>   I believe drupal should be able to do most of what we want out of 
> the box, but it doesn't come for free. Drupal requires more from the 
> server than static html pages. It's based around PHP and MySQL so it 
> has some performance requirements. Do we have access to a server that 
> can provide PHP and MySQL? If not, then I don't think we can create a 
> "Octave Central".

Hosting Drupal on sourceforge is apparently possible:

   http://starkos.industriousone.com/drupal_on_sourceforge

Ability to upload/download packages is a minimum.  Anything else is 
optional.


Some desirable features:

* Signed packages.
* Author email associated with each package (though not necessarily 
visible).
* Only authors/administrators can update/remove packages --- we can 
avoid passwords if package updates are confirmed by email.
* Issue tracking is useful so long as it is simple, and the submitter 
doesn't have to have an account.
* A talk page for each package might be enough, particularly if it is 
echoed to the author email address.
* Ratings aren't that useful.
* Download statistics might be nice.
* Tags would be good, particularly as the number of packages grows.  To 
make tags more useful, users should have to choose from a tag list.  
Creating new tags should be difficult.
* Precompiled binaries for Windows and OS X.
* Online package docs and source browsing --- make it easy to decide 
whether a package is worth downloading.