Re: [Octave Forge] Octave 4.0 call for packages

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 10:46:38 -0700, Philip Nienhuis wrote:
> Looking at general, I wonder if it would be a lot of work to simply drop the
> inputParser stuff, add a dependency on Octave-4.0.0+ and then make a new
> release? (bumping just the last digit of the version number)
> I've only got general pkg installed because it was/is a dependency for
> several other packages.

Personally I would prefer to keep inputParser in general and allow it
to shadow the one in Octave until 4.0 has been out for a while, for
some definition of "a while". It's safer, allows people to upgrade
more smoothly, allows users to stick with Octave 3.8 but update Forge
packages, etc. But if the rest of you would rather remove it and put
out a new general depending on Octave 4.0, don't let me hold you back.

> Similar reasoning might hold for the specfun package; I believe I've seen
> the shadow warnings about the ellipke, expint and erfcinv functions for 3 or
> 4 years now (maybe even longer).Do these functions really add something to
> the core functions?
> The specfun package functions expint_E1 and expint_Ei work fine with core
> expint().

I imported these functions into core for 3.8, the specfun versions do
not add anything. The same logic as above applies, they still exist in
specfun because no one has made a new release of the package to remove
those functions since being added to core. I mentioned earlier in
another thread that I would be in favor of dropping the entire specfun
package now.

I believe you touched on the difficulty of dropping complete packages
in another thread, users are still under the impression that they have
to install the java package for example. Any ideas for how to better
inform users that they don't need to install java or specfun anymore?
Put out a new release of the package with no contents?

-- 
mike