Merging Octave and Octave-Forge?

[John W. Eaton]

On 25-Aug-2008, address@hidden wrote:

|    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?".

I think it exists because several people thought I was too slow to
accept contributed code in the core Octave distribution.  Also, it is
nice to have a place where people can work collaboratively on
contributed code.  Much of that code is domain specific and not really
suitable for the core Octave distribution in any case.

|    * The Octave-Forge web site is fairly nice, while the Octave web site
|      doesn't provide much information.

Thanks.  We try hard to achieve that goal.  It's nice to know we have
succeeded in some small way.  :-/

| 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.

Because no one has put it there?

Except for wiki.octave.org, the octave.org domain is hosted on a
system at the University of Wisconsin.  For the most part, it
redirects to savannah.gnu.org where the actual Octave web pages are
hosted.

You can edit the savannah web pages if you are interested.  All you
need to do is send me your savannah user id and I can add you to the
project.

I have periodically asked for help in managing the web pages.  Other
than me, there are currently 3 people listed as active members who can
edit the web pages.  Since we moved the pages to savannah, I think
only Bill Denney and I have ever edited any of the pages, and I think
I'm the only one who has done anything with them in the last year or
so.  And I don't have time for much more than updating the news,
download and front pages when there is a new release.

It would be very helpful to me if someone (or group) were to take over
the web site. 

| 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?

If they are merged, then you are effectively saying that the
contributed packages are part of the (GNU) Octave project, so then I
think the packages would need to all agree to the principles of the
GNU project in the same way as I did when I agreed to make Octave a
GNU project.  Is that what you (and all current and future
contributors) want?

|    * 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.

If we distribute a binary of Octave for Windows from ftp.gnu.org, then
I think it should be built with MinGW, not MSVC.  What is the
situation for Emacs?  Is the Windows binary of Emacs built with MinGW?

|    * 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.

One problem here is that it is not clear to people which functions
come from Octave Forge and which are core functions.  I think that is
partly because of the way the language works.  It's not like Python or
R, where you have to explicitly load a package to use a function from
that package.  So presumably when programming in those languages, you
know that a particular function belongs to a particular package.

|    * 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.

I'm not sure savannah is much better, but I recently found that they
now support Mercurial so I'm hoping to be able to move my public
archive there (there will still be a redirect from octave.org).

jwe