Re: Revert mass exodus of statistics functions

[Carnë Draug]

On 22 March 2018 at 16:29, Rik <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On 03/22/2018 09:00 AM, address@hidden wrote:
>
> Subject:
> Revert mass exodus of statistics functions
> From:
> Carnë Draug <address@hidden>
>
>> For the upcoming Octave version, we moved a bunch of Octave functions
>> from core to the statistics Forge package.  We are also now planning
>> on having a statistics package as part of core.
>>
>> This is already causing trouble because we don't a have a release of
>> the forge package to cover the removed functions.  What if we revert
>> that change and instead move the functions to the core package for 4.6
>> release?  This would be less disruption to the end user and avoid the
>> complications on the current forge package.
>>
>
> How long is this going to be an issue?  If 4.4 is released won't
> there be an accompanying update and release of the statistics
> package?

Well, someone will have to do it and I don't see anyone working on
preparing it.

And there shouldn't even be a need for a synced release of the forge
statistics package.  Because the package aims at supporting older
octave versions, the new release will still work with 4.2.  The reason
why a new statistics package has not been done cannot be because it's
waiting on a 4.4 release.

Also, what happens with mxe-octave?  My understanding is that it comes
with forge packages.  However, because there hasn't been a statistic
package with those functions so the mxe octave release for 4.4 will
come with a statistics package that will not include the removed
functions.

So a new release of the statistics package should be done first.

> If this is a 6-week problem then I would prefer to just suffer
> through it.  Even when statistics move back in to core they will
> still be a package.  I don't think it hurts to start training those
> users who want all of these functions to put 'pkg load statistics'
> in their .octaverc file.

But what about those functions that do not end up in the core
statistics package (matlab incompatible functions)?  Users of such
functions will now have to load the statistics package and in 9
months, when 5.0 gets released, they will have to do something else
which we don't even know what it is yet.  But maybe a core package
will take longer to happen, and maybe there's not even users of those
functions.

Carnë