Packages (Re: Toolboxes? (RE: GPLv3))

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Oct-2007, Schirmacher, Rolf wrote:

| The major benefit of a package / toolbox approach is the managability of the
| overall project and in fact we have something even worse right now: octave
| and octave-forge with packages.

I don't see this as a bad situation.  The packages are not part of
Octave itself, but are independent add-on things, so doesn't it make
some sense that they are distributed separately from Octave?

I know that splitting the monolithic Octave Forge into separate
packages has caused some pain, but I think this is the only sane way
to go as the number of functions in Octave Forge grows.  Simply
installing everything isn't a very good approach, especially when
parts of the collection override core functions in Octave with new
functions with the same name but different behavior.  That's just
asking for trouble for new users, and I don't think it should be done
by default.  But as I recall, that was the situation for a while, and
the standard advice people were getting was to "get Octave Forge if
you want Octave to be more like Matlab", only then they also could get
a few surprises.

Finally, can we please call them packages instead of "toolboxes"?

Thanks,

jwe