Re: Merging Octave and Octave-Forge?

[Thomas Weber]

Am Dienstag, den 26.08.2008, 11:41 -0400 schrieb 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.

I guess we can ignore the historical reasons for its existence. There
was a question just last week about an equivalent to M.'s file exchange,
so people are looking for a place to share code.


> 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?

That is probably impossible (octave-forge has quite some different
licenses already).

> |    * 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?

It shouldn't be too difficult to continue shipping the MSVC build from
SF. Now, a MinGW build via gnu.org would probably be nice as well.

> 
> |    * 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 agree, but as Soren has correctly stated, we already have that
situation today, where stuff is actually clearly separated and users
still confuse it.


> |    * 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).

I have the feeling that due to the way Octave packages work, no
off-the-shelf hosting solution will work.

        Thomas