Re: very small packages - merge into general/miscelleneous or move into core

[c.]

On 12 Jan 2014, at 01:02, Carnë Draug <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi
> 
> packages such as strings or struct have been reducing in size, their
> functions either moved into Octave core or deprecated in favour of
> others that are Matlab compatible. At the moment, they have only a
> handful of functions and I don't see a need to have them as separate
> packages.
> 
> For each of them I can see 3 things:
> 
> 1) they're useful and are moved into Octave core (either as a separate
> function or extension to existing ones)
> 2) they're useful but they are not wanted in core so they are merged
> into the general or miscellaneous package
> 3) they're not that useful or are so simple that it's not worth having
> them in a package
> 
> What do you guys of each of them. See:
> 
> http://octave.sourceforge.net/strings/overview.html
> http://octave.sourceforge.net/struct/overview.html
> 
> I'm sure there are other functions who made sense when they were
> implemented some years ago but could now be replaced by other stuff in
> core. Does anyone have suggestions?
> 
> Carnë

Carnë,

As you probably already know, I'm strongly opposed to any 
change that takes us closer to the infamous "monoloithic releases" 
approach.

I am already a bit confused about what "miscallaneous"
and "general" are meant to be, and I'm afraid that
if you continue adding functions to them they'll keep 
growing and eventually become unmanageable.

I think before you make such changes you should consider 
the following aspects:

1) Can you explain in detail what these two packages are, 
   i.e. a deterministic criterion to identify functions that 
   should go into each of them?
   Let's say I'm not familiar with the contents of OF and I 
   am looking for some function that solves a particular 
   problem I have, e.g. I have to apply the same function 
   to all the elements of a large cell-arry and want to do 
   so in parallel, what should lead me to find out that the 
   solution to my problem is in the "general" package? why 
   isn't it in "miscellaneous"?

2) Let's say I found out (most likely by asking on the list) 
   that I need "parcellfun" and therefore I installed "general". 
   What makes you think I probably also need the functions currently 
   in "strings" or "struct"? 
   Or, to use an example that affects me directly, what makes you 
   think that if I like to have a database of common physical constants
   I should also be interested in solving sudoku or "game of life"?

3) Now consider I am a developer and I found and possibly fixed
   a bug in "parcellfun". I want to make a release to make this
   fix available, but there are problems whith other functions
   in the same package which I don't really know anything about 
   and they have problems that make the release unpractical. 
   Should I hold back the release until those are fixed? Why? 

Finally consider that the "struct" package does have an official 
maintainer, "general" and "miscellaneous" don't. Do you think we need
more packages with a specified maintainer or do we need less?

Just my .2€
c.