Re: Octave-Forge website / docs.html

[c.]

On 13 Aug 2014, at 13:23, Julien Bect <address@hidden> wrote:

> Le 13/08/2014 12:46, c. a écrit :
>> the list used internally by pkg.m is here:
>> 
>> http://octave.sourceforge.net/list_packages.php
>> 
>> be aware that this is not a static text file it is generated
>> by a server-side script by iterating over all directories containing
>> html docs.
> 
> It seems a little unnatural to me to require that the whole OF website has 
> been built to be able to get something as "primitive" as the list of all 
> Octave packages...
> 
> Especially since I'm looking for a way to _build_ the website... If the 
> website is lost, then I cannot get the package list... so how I can I rebuild 
> the website ?
> 
> It would make more sense to me to have a STATIC list of packages somewhere 
> (perhaps on a Mercurial repo on SF, together with all the other admin scripts 
> that are used to build the website ?) that could be used to build the 
> website, and also uploaded as octave.sourceforge.net/list_packages.txt (for 
> instance) for use from pkg.
> 
> Does that make sense to you ?

No, it doesn't.

With the current setup, the process to make a package release is very simple, 
the package maintainer produces the package tarball and html docs and the site
maintainer uploads the docs to the website.

When a new package is added or removed the list changes automatically.

So there is no maintainance work to be done on the package list, while
maintainance of each package is completely done by the package maintainers.

The main idea behind the design of Octave Forge is to reduce centralized 
maintainance to a minimum and delegate as many tasks as possible to package 
maintainers.

Whatever change you plan, I strongly recommend that you please follow this 
approach 
anything else has proven to be unpractical with the EXTREMELY low workforce we
can dedicate to site maintaince.

c.