Re: [OctDev] Test web-site of new octave-forge web-site including all packages

[John Swensen]

David Bateman wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> If you'd like to see what Soren and I have been working on for
> octave-forge and the package manager, please look at the test website
> http://octave.dbateman.org I'm hosting on my home machine. This is a
> fully functional version of what Soren and I propose to be used for the
> new octave-forge web site and is heavily based on the current octave
> style, with a couple of limitations imposed by our automatic build (no
> grayed right justified nav menu for the current item).
>
> As this is my home machine, I'd prefer that it was not too heavily
> loaded, so please use the above site with discretion. We promise to make
> it available on sourceforge soon. The goal of making this site available
> was to allow comment on the content and presentation prior to the site
> going live. If you want to use the packages from the above site I'd
> suggest that you use the current CVS as there are still issues with the
> package manager even in 2.9.9.
>
> Things that I know to need work include
>
> 1) "make check" of the csape.m function fails due to recent changes in
> ppval.m. This needs to be fixed before going live.
>
> 2) Sort the categories pulldown in function reference alphabetically
>
> 3) It might be good to have a NEWS item to the home page with info on
> new versions of packages. For now this will just be a single news item
> on the major changes for the package manager. Include a link from there
> to a NEWS archive and to the full octave-forge Changelog
>
> 4) Move the www/ directory in the doc/ directory and the build-www.py
> script into admin/. Place the files for the website (installed and
> built) in doc/www/
>
> 5) Graceplot and GPC packages need fixing
>
> 6) What to do with the additional files in octave-forge that are no
> longer used?
>
> Note that I'd really like to hand of release management issue of
> octave-forge to some-one else and so don't know how involved I'll be in
> the upkeep of the octave-forge website after it goes live. However, I
> believe if we can enforce that the developers update the package version
> number in the the DESCRIPTION files, it might be possible to automate
> the package distribution, webpage update and NEWS items. So the job of
> the release manager might be relatively light. Anyone want this task?
>
> As for the RPM and DEB packagers. I believe that the process in the CVS
> "./configure; make; make srpms" will build at least example SRPMS. I
> have no automatic build process for DEBs in place yet.
>
> Regards
> David
>
>   
This is slightly off-topic, but related to the package manager.  Is 
there plans now that there will be pre-packaged, individual tar.gz files 
for each package to do something like 'pkg dl 
<package_name_without_version>' to download the most recent package 
file?  Maybe even a 'pkg upgrade' or something like that to check for 
more recent version and prompt the user to upgrade package-by-package?  
If you are not averse to this idea, I would be willing to work on it 
(probably using wget or curl, I think most machines have one of these two).

Suggested commands:
pkg netlist
pkg netinstall
pkg netupgrade

John Swensen