Concurrent maintenance of the Octave packaging

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

Talking to jwe in #octave in IRC, he brought up an interesting point.
Why don't we maintain the Octave packaging for various platforms
(Macintosh OS X, Windows, debs and rpms) inside the Octave tree? And
build them regularly? Even offer "use at your own risk" built debs and
rpms from octave.org?

The rationale is this: we can regularly check the status of the
packaging and update it incrementally, possibly share maintenance.
This is better than waiting for major releases and pile a lot of
packaging work all at once.

I am CCing the Debian Octave mailing list, because it's the one I more
or less work with myself. I get the impression most packagers are
listening in on the Octave maintainers' list, but if you know of a
packager who isn't, please contact them. The rest of what I will say
is mostly Debian-specific.

I know that the usual Debian practice is to strip the debian/
directory if a source tarball contains it, but that's usually because
there isn't very good communication between Debian and upstream. Now
that we're actually moving towards keeping the tarball source with the
Debian packaging, perhaps this can be an overall good move? This
should ease the burden of packaging if it's shared between Octave and
Debian developers.

- Jordi G. H.