Re: Removing packages from Octave Forge

[Alexander Barth]

Dear Thomas and Carnë ,

 

>
> Are there confirmed reports that those packages do not work anymore in
> recent versions of octave?

This approach doesn't work. We had Octave in Debian seg-faulting at
startup on some architecturves for *years*. As nobody was using the
software at all on these architectures, no bug about this was *ever*
reported.

That a package produces a segmentation fault on a rarely used architecture can also happen with a actively maintained software. If no one use the package on a specific architecture, how could the maintainers know that there is a problem?

Some packages are also simple script files. For example I use the mapping package for years and I never had a problem with it. There is no additional feature of this package that I would need. I am fine with the fact that there has no release since 2009.

To improve code quality, I would rather suggest to ask the maintainers (if they can be reached) to add a test script to their package which verifies the functioning of the package as a whole (e.g. test_<packagename>.m). This script could call for exemple the test code the individual file with the test function but it would also check if the functions work correctly together.  I can write such a test script for mapping. If a package fails its test suite, then we have, in my oppion, a more objective way to decide that this package should be removed from the "official" list of packages.

 Regards

Alex

Move the package into an archive and if someone complains, move it back.
The other way does not work at all.

        Thomas