Re: bioinfo package - maintenance of ...

[Oliver Heimlich]

Am 19. Dezember 2017 08:41:38 MEZ schrieb Julien Bect <address@hidden>:
>Le 19/12/2017 à 06:10, Oliver Heimlich a écrit :
>> The reason why Octave coding style is requested for packages is 
>> twofold: (a) it shall allow to easily move a function from a package 
>> into Octave core or into another package, (b) it shall be easier to 
>> contribute to community maintained packages for all of us, which is 
>> easier when all packages follow a corporate style.
>> Reason (a) is probably irrelevant for several packages. If only small
>functions are of interest, the effort would be small to convert them
>into Octave style.
>>
>> Reason (b) is really important because I'd like to see more
>contributions to packages happening and a common style helps with that
>in the long run. It simplifies to accept contributions if you don't
>have to reformat the patches.
>
>Sure, I would also like to see more contributions happening ;-)
>
>And you guys are really going to discourage someone who is willing to 
>contribute to an *unmaintained* package just because he wants to use % 
>instead of # and "end" instead of "endif", "endfor", etc. ?

No! That would be the worst possible outcome.

I can imagine three possible solutions.

1a) the unmaintained package becomes an external package where the coding style 
is not a requirement. This would still be an improvement over the current 
situation where the pkg is unavailable for the user.

1b) like above, but somebody (Olaf et al?) maintains a community clone package 
with Octave style. However, I'd say that we have better things to do...

2) the package is maintained in Octave style and a Matlab compatible version 
can be compiled by automatically replacing # with %, endif with end and so on 
(like doctest does it).

Best
Oliver

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