Re: Octave-Forge bugs in the tracker?

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 23 July 2011 13:13, c. <address@hidden> wrote:

> It seems the majority of those who spoke on this topic have an
> opposite point of view, but actually I'm not a great fan of having
> octave-forge and octave too close together, I think they are two
> different projects and that it would be convenient to keep it so.

Our users disagree with this all the time. And most of the time, so do
we. When they say, "I want to accomplish such and such task", how
often are we able to not mention some Octave-Forge package? The
separation between Octave and Octave-Forge is awkward and is
unnecessarily segregating our very small community.

> For example many of those who contribute to octave-forge or that
> contributed in the past would not have done so if requirements for
> acessing octave-forge would not have been much less strict than
> those for octave (in terms of coding standards, licensing terms
> etc.)

If Octave-Forge were hosted in Savannah, there is no requirement to
follow GNU coding standards, and any license is fine as long as it's
GPL-compatible, which Octave-Forge packages have to be anyways except
for the non-free ones nobody uses.

> One more thing to consider is that, especially taking into account
> the VERY limited work force taking care of octave-forge at the
> moment, I would suggest to think twice before making "revolutionary"
> changes that would require a non negligible amount of work. OF is a
> quite successful project that, thanks to the great hard work done by
> many in the past, currently gets on with very little effort by very
> few people (mostly Søren only). Sure, there is lots of ways OF can
> and should be improved, but past attempts to throw it all away and
> start over have not gone very far

The amount of work to do here is very limited. Moving from SourceForge
to Savannah is basically just re-uploading the code and updating a few
urls in the web pages. I don't see a reason to move the web hosting.

> (e.g. did agora ever actually take off?).

Agora is not a project to replace Octave-Forge, and I still work on it
a little now and then, but no, it hasn't really taken off.

But hey, if Duke Nukem Forever and HURD are making releases, why not
Agora? ;-)

> Finally I am not sure that having a single bug tracker for all
> octave-forge packages makes any sense. The current approach is to
> let each package maintainer take care of his/her own packages and be
> responsible for their status. Often when users report bugs in the
> mailing list, they are instructed to contact the package maintainer
> directly. I even doubt many package maintainers would ever look into
> the common bug tracker.

This only works for the packages that actually have a dedicated
maintainer, which most don't. Thomas Weber recently droped a bunch of
Octave-Forge Debian packages because they were unmaintained.

We can always tell Savannah to CC a particular maintainer when a bug
discussion starts, the maintainer can then go to Savannnah and follow
that bug there. As for the rest, we can use a collaborative
maintenance approach where we have a common publicly available list of
problems so that anyone can go to that list and take care of the
problems. There are a number of Octave-Forge packages I would like to
patch myself, but I find Octave-Forge unwieldy to work with right now.

- Jordi G. H.