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

[c.]

On 15 Sep 2012, at 10:52, Philip Nienhuis wrote:

> Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>> 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
> <snip>
> 
> Moreover, nothing on the main Octave web pages (www.octave.org) mentions 
> Octave-Forge anywhere, nor octave.sf.net, nor even the fact that add-on 
> packages for Octave exist at all and can be found on Sourceforge uhm..., 
> Octave-Forge.
> 
> Only indirectly, on the wiki linked to from the "Support" page, one can 
> find the first casual mention of add-on packages.
> 
> IMO this setup was a community decision at the time so I never bothered 
> much.
> 
> Philip


This post on Carnë's blog summarizes the discussion about 
Octave/Octave-Forge/Agora
at OctConf2012. A preview of Agora is here http://agora.octave.org/.

HTH,
c.