Re: On the union of two communities - The GNU Octave atmosphere

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 09/14/2012 06:53 PM, Júlio Hoffimann wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
>
>     There are three, maybe four levels of Octave code:
>
>     1) Core Octave written in C++ (i.e., compiled code)
>     2) Commonly-used, moderately-general m-scripts (i.e., interpreted code)
>     3) Compiled or scripted code related to user interface, whether that
>     be a graphics engine, GUI/IDE, etc.
>     4) Voluminous packages of field-related m-scripts
>
>
> Thanks for your reply. These levels are familiar to me, i'm contributing
> with very little patches when i have time.
>
> This week i started to use Octave Forge, precisely the optimization
> package. I found some missing headers during the installation and wanted
> to submit another patch as usual, but then i realized i should clone
> another repository, find another bug track system, subscribe to another
> mailing list to discuss about it. I said to myself, this is wrong, let's
> make it better.

I understand that, and this confusion may have been one of the 
motivations for the conversation at OctConf 2012.  It stems from the 
choice of name Octave Forge, which is similar to the name SourceForge 
(whether that is the reason for the name, I'm not sure), and if I'm 
remembering correctly Octave development too may have been on 
SourceForge at one time.

Even though the web pages for Octave and OctaveForge are fairly well 
organized, they might not be so descriptive about the relationship 
between the two.  For example, on the main page

http://octave.sourceforge.net/

it states "Octave-Forge is a central location for the collaborative 
development of packages for GNU Octave."  Nothing there implies 
Octave-Forge is closely tied in with the Octave core code, but I realize 
those unfamiliar with the setup come to an introduction believe there 
is.  In the developers description is:

http://octave.sourceforge.net/developers.html

"To contribute your .m files, C++, C, or Fortran code to the GNU Octave 
Repository (octave-forge) you need to" which doesn't add clarity and 
slightly obfuscates because of the phrase "GNU Octave Repository". 
Maybe one concludes "repository for GNU Octave" in the sense that is 
were GNU Octave is.  A better phrasing might be "repository of packages 
that run under GNU Octave", or "repository for GNU Octave compatible 
packages".

Can you think of any way the initial introduction could have been made 
more straightforward?

Dan