Re: Alternative to Source Forge for Octave Packages (Was : Re: pdepe)

[Carlo De Falco]

On 31 May 2016, at 12:21, Oliver Heimlich <address@hidden> wrote:

> SourceForge is behaving very well under the new ownership so far. Also I
> have the impression that the Julia community is in a much bigger vendor
> lock-in compared to us due to their deep integration of GitHub (and no
> other providers) and Travis CI. Both third-party proprietary services.
> They have waived control over their infrastructure.

I think we don't want to keep full direct control of our infrastructure either.

We just don't want to be (again) so tightly integrated with one particular
vendor that we cannot easily switch in the future.

Ideally I would love to have each package hosted independently
and only the metadata repository (and maybe point release tarballs) 
centralized.

>> Anyway, IIUC in julia the pull-request is only needed to register
>> a NEW package. Package developers are then give push access
>> to JuliaLang/METADATA.jl for subsequent updates (I see currently 
>> 437 contributors in that repository). Is my impression wrong?
>> 
>> c.
>> 
> 
> There are over 5000 pull requests, many labeled “Tag packagename
> version”, which looks like new version releases to me. Others are
> labeled “Register packagename”, which look like new packages added. The
> contributors mainly are the package maintainers since they have
> contributed the updated metadata via pull requests.

I was misguided by the fact that I was not aware that users sending pull 
requests would end up automatically in the contributors list.

> I don't know how
> many of them actually have push access.
> On average there are 5 pull
> requests per package, thus approximately 5 releases per package.
> 
> As far as I see it the advantages over Octave Forge are:
> - higher automation
> - continuous integration for all packages
> - a distributed(?) review process for package uploads (which scales
> better than a single admin)
> - an option for the user to install development versions
> - a cleaner separation of the metadata repository, although they don't
> make much use of it if everything is GitHub only.

Sounds like a good list of advantages already, but you are probably
right that we need to improve on their model if we want a system
that really suits our needs.

It would be great if we could get a proof-of-concept demonstrator
in time for OctConf in Geneva this autumn ...

> Oliver

c.