Re: Octave-Forge bugs in the tracker?

[c.]

On 24 Jul 2011, at 14:57, Thomas Weber wrote:

>> 
>> 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.
> 
> Unmaintained packages are unmaintained. Neither the used bug tracker,
> the used VCS nor the web hosting changes anything about that. Technology
> doesn't change the schedule of people.
> 
> In fact, having a single repository for each -forge package - have you
> guys looked at octave-forge recently? We are talking about 80-100
> repositories here. I mean, it is actually trivial to set up a repository
> at bitbucket, github, ... and develop a package there. Is there any
> real, hard evidence that more people would join the project if the VCS
> hosting and VCS system used would change? And more, what is hindering
> those people to use one of the gazillion different hosting sides right
> now?

This comment made me think again about a possible improvement to OF I had been 
considering in the past already.

I agree that having one separate repository for each separate package makes no 
sense.
On the other hand it would be nice to allow to distribute via Octave-forge 
packages that 
are not developed in the repository. 

As Søren noted, developement of some packages happens mostly elsewhere, so 
having
as a requirement for distributing a package via OF that the code be in the 
repository
seems a bit awkward.

It used to make sense when monolithic releases were being built automatically 
by makefiles
in the repository, but why should we still force that now? Although there is no 
hard evidence that 
this would attract more contributors, I know for sure it would attract more 
packages,
I myself am developing some projects where having a separate VCS repository and 
website is a 
requirement but distributing packages via different channels would not be a 
problem.

Any thoughts on this?

c.

P.S. Is the octvae-maintainers list the best place to hold this discussion? 
shouldn't it be held on the octave-forge mailing list?