Re: Separation of scripts in octave and octave-forge

[David Bateman]

Arno Onken wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I find the separation between the scripts in octave and octave-forge a
> bit inconsistent for users that come from the MATLAB world. I thought
> the idea was to only have functions in octave that are both, high
> quality and in some sense "core functions". But in MATLAB, all the
> statistics functions are in a separate toolbox, whereas some functions
> that are "core" in MATLAB are still in octave-forge. And in terms of
> quality: I don't think that the rayl* distribution functions in
> octave-forge (I admit, happen to be mine ;-) ) are inferior to the other
> distribution functions in octave, whereas the hyge* functions in octave
> are incompatible to MATLAB (I just sent a patch to bugs-octave :-) ). My
> point is that I don't think that this separation is justified in terms
> of quality.
>   
> Now that the package manager is in place and 3.0 is coming, wouldn't it
> make sense to move all the statistics, signal, ... functions to
> octave-forge? The packages would get more of the MATLAB toolbox character.
>   

Yes this is what has been suggested. However, no one want this to be
done before 3.0 for several reasons.. Firstly that the package manager
is still new and we should not move functions from the core of Octave
till the package manager is widely accepted and used. Secondly, 3.0 is
so close that we should avoid major changes till then.. I expect
sometime during the 3.1.x series that many functions are likely to be
moved from Octave to octave-forge... At that point we will have a major
problem in that we will have to support two versions of octave-forge,
one for the 3.0.x series and one for the 3.1.x series. For that reason
I'd personally prefer that 3.1.x gets to a point that is a few months
from a stable release and then move all of the functions to octave-forge
and then only support a 3.1.x series in octave-forge.. Unfortunately I
don't think we have enough resources to support both.

D.

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