Merging Octave and Octave-Forge?

[soren]

Hi,
  As I've recently announced a new release of Octave-Forge has just  
been made. Whenever I make these releases the same thought pops up in  
my head: "why does Octave-Forge even exist?". (This line of thinking  
is probably related to the fact the making the release is a painful  
experience... :-) )
  Here are some of my thoughts/observations about the  
Octave/Octave-Forge relationship:

  * The Octave-Forge web site is fairly nice, while the Octave web site
    doesn't provide much information. Personally, I use the function reference
    on the Octave-Forge website quite a bit, and I also find the doxygen stuff
    useful. I don't see why this stuff isn't on the Octave website. However,
    maintaining the Octave-Forge website is plenty of work, so I'm definitely
    not volunteering for the job of also maintaining octave.org. So why not
    merge the websites into one?

  * The Windows binary at Octave-Forge currently is the de-facto way  
of getting
    Octave on Windows. I really think this binary is a great feature, and I
    honestly think it should be hosted at octave.org, and be blessed as the
    semi-official way of getting Octave on Windows. I don't  
know/understand the
    Mac situation, as it seems many people are also using Fink.

  * One reason for the Octave/Octave-Forge split is that the Octave mailing
    lists shouldn't be spammed with mails from people who have problems with
    the Octave-Forge functions. These people should use the  
Octave-Forge mailing
    lists. However, this isn't really happening at the moment. Everybody just
    seems to use the 'help' octave mailing list.

  * I think new users are confused by the split between Octave and  
Octave-Forge.
    I don't think we present the boundaries between the two projects very well
    to new users. I'm guessing this is simply because nobody really  
knows these
    boundaries...

  * The Octave-Forge infrastructure (SVN, release management, servers and
    bandwidth, ...) are very nice to have available. But honestly, this
    infrastructure just isn't very good. Their servers are slow, and the
    release process is very painful.

Anyway, this mail is getting long (sorry 'bout that) so I'll stop now.  
But I'd like to ask: why are Octave and Octave-Forge two separate  
projects? Why don't we simply have http://packages.octave.org as a  
place for downloading add-on packages?

Søren