Re: Bug tracker for Octave Forge

[Søren Hauberg]

tor, 10 06 2010 kl. 12:00 -0400, skrev John W. Eaton:
> I don't want the Octave bug tracker to be the place to report bugs for
> Octave Forge packages.  Those packages are not part of Octave and I
> don't think we want to appear to be responsible for the bug reports
> for them.

I can understand this position.

> OTOH, people don't seem to understand when they are using a function
> from a package vs. a function from Octave, so they will continue to
> report bugs in package functions in the Octave tracker.

I don't really know what we can do to change this perception. One option
would be to mark all packages as "noautoload", such that people would be
forced to run

  pkg load package_name

before using a package function. That would make it more clear where a
package is coming from, but I guess such an action would just create
angry users.

> It would be
> good to have a way to move those bugs to the appropriate place rather
> than just telling people that they have done something wrong by
> reporting the bug.

I fear that a lot of people get the impression today that they did
something wrong when reporting a bug.

> Maybe that could be fixed, but is
> savannah even the right place for Octave Forge?  Given the current
> variety of licensing in Octave Forge and the fact that it is not a GNU
> project, I think it would have to be hosted at savannah.nongnu.org.

These days I think we have one non-free package (some spline stuff) that
hasn't been maintained in years (I don't think anything has been checked
into that package in all the time I've been involved). I'd be willing to
remove this package from the repository.

All other packages seem to be GPL, BSD or public domain. So is licensing
really an issue?

Soren