Re: pending interval-3.0.0 release

[Oliver Heimlich]

On 20.08.2017 20:47, Olaf Till wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 20, 2017 at 11:00:41AM +0200, Oliver Heimlich wrote:
>> I have now put the generated test data under version control and it is
>> possible to run the package from source or make a release tarball
>> without these special dependencies.
> 
> I know I'm delaying the release, but I don't think that putting a
> generated file additionally to the sources under version control is a
> good idea.
> 
> The issue I saw was not so much with the difficulty (installing some
> tools) to reproduce the release.

There have been other reasons to put it under version control as well
(see the commit message), but I understand that it doesn't solve the
general problem.

> Rather, we should assure that generating the distributed data from
> source is always possible. Since we distribute the binary file
> 'itl.mat', we must distribute its 'preferred form' of editable
> sources.
> 
> These sources could be the corresponding .tst files, which currently
> are only temporary files during the build. But though they are
> editable, it's their .itl sources which are meant to be edited. We
> distribute these .itl sources. The problem with this is that the tool
> for converting .itl to .tst is not in standard distributions (?), but
> only in an external repo. I think if we distribute the .itl files, we
> also must distribute the conversion tool (and not rely on its
> availability in an external repo). I am not a lawyer, but as long as
> we distribute the package with no commercial intent, it could suffice
> to clone the external repo at Octave Forge and to put a hint into the
> distributed package where the tool is available at Octave Forge.

The preferred form for editing is in the .itl files.  The intermediate
.tst-files are barely human readable.  On the other hand, the itl.mat
file can also be edited easily, since it is just a data file, which can
be processed with Octave.

The main difference at this point is that the .itl files are portable
(not Octave specific) and the .mat file can only be used with Octave.

That external tool (and the .itl files) is meant to be used by interval
arithmetic library developers to share the test data.  It is a very
specific use case, which is unique in the Octave community and maybe
affects only a few dozen users worldwide.  I guess you won't find that
tool largerly redistributed.

Instead of hosting it on OF we could as well bundle it in the interval
repository.  Another possibility could be to publish it in some official
Python repository, so you can pull it from there instead of Github.
Would that end your worries?

> BTW it could be good to checkout a certain version of the cloned repo
> during building (if I havn't overlooked that this is already done).

Yes, the Makefile should clone a particular revision.  I have extended
the Makefile accordingly.

Oliver