Re: maintaining some packages at core Octave (was: Re: OctConf 2018, second day -- a lot of discussions and some work done)

[Juan Pablo Carbajal]

> Anyway, in the case of still hosting these packages at OF, the
> following could be an applicable scheme:
>
> - We mark such packages as 'core'.
>
> - Within a package:
>
> -- we select functions which should get more attention as 'core
>    package functions'; to mark these, only these will be in inst/ and
>    src/ .
>
> -- all other functions go under inst-extra/ and src-extra/ and are
>    pulled in by src/Makefile, so they are still available.
>
> - We only support the current Octave version (?). I.e. a stable branch
>   supports only the latest major release and a development branch
>   supports the development version of Octave.

I only have a comment regarding the scheme. In OF I would try to keep
the process of building package as simple as possible, if we still
want to offer a place for a community which might not be composed only
of developers that enjoy reading and handling complicated Makefiles.
It seems to me that scheme will indeed increase the complexity of the Makefiles.

Are we going to re-discuss the role of OF? (without an Agora-like site
OF is the only place we have to develop a community of domain specific
contributors, i.e. what made matlab so popular, i.e. not developers)
If not then lets keep the complexity of developing, distributing, and
maintaining as low as possible, avoiding intricacies.

Alternatively we will have to maintain templates for dev-like OF
contributors (to my dislike this is what it is currently offered) and
for domain specify contributors. Do we want that (re: resources)?