Re: The octave-unstable PPA

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 12:29 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> I am a little uncomfortable with the octave-unstable PPA for Ubuntu
> for a number of reasons.
>
> You are now distributing an alpha release as if it were stable. Ubuntu
> users don't typically learn to discriminate about the stability of
> their packaging sources. They are conditioned to believe that
> "unstable" means "Debian unstable" which means "current" which means
> "the best". This now means that Ubuntu users will take look at the
> Octave GUI which is still in a rough state. I don't know what the
> download statistics are like, but I am uncomfortable with Octave's
> reputation being tarnished by the wide release of an alpha release
> (it's obtained from alpha.gnu.org, after all).

I can sorta see your point here. The "unstable" name should mean one
thing, but the meaning has been somewhat distorted within
Debian/Ubuntu circles. I have no problem renaming the PPA to "alpha",
"broken", or "development", or "experimental", whichever sounds the
least encouraging :)

> While I applaud the enthusiasm of following Octave development, I
> would prefer if there was a very clear way to indicate that this is a
> development, unstable, experimental, broken version, and if you're
> using it, that's because you want to participate in Octave
> development.

I agree. I will put some disclaimer text into the PPA description if
someone doesn't beat me to it. This is what will be displayed on the
web page, as well as what the user will see when they choose to add
the PPA to their system and are asked to confirm.

Personally, I would advise someone seeking a binary for Ubuntu to use
the official builds or our "stable" PPA. If they want the development
version, they should be able to build from source anyway.

-- 
mike