Octave Central (or something like that)

[Søren Hauberg]

Hi,
  Warning looong post... sorry about that

  A while back there was a brief discussion about creating something 
like Matlab Central for Octave. I believe the conclusion was that 
somebody needs to do something before it was worth discussing. I am not 
really web developer so I'm really not an expert.

  The reason why I wanted the package system in the first place was 
that I believe it's important that users can easily share code. For this 
packages are nice, but we really miss a place where people can post 
their packages. So I think we need something that can be compared to the 
Matlab Central.

  So I've been looking a bit at drupal 5.1 (http://drupal.org) that is 
one of the standard Free Content Management Systems. I don't have a 
server so I've just installed it on my laptop, meaning I can't provide a 
live demo for you to try.

  Drupal can do the following (and a lot more) out of the box:
  * Users can create and edit different kinds of pages including 
standard web pages, blog-like pages, and book pages.
  * Users can upload files (like packages) to the server.
  * Users can add comments to pages.
  * Some users can be administrators which mean they can change the 
site look, change the rights of other users, and other boring things.

  So the central question is: if we are to have an 'Octave Central' 
what should it be able to do?

  I believe drupal should be able to do most of what we want out of the 
box, but it doesn't come for free. Drupal requires more from the server 
than static html pages. It's based around PHP and MySQL so it has some 
performance requirements. Do we have access to a server that can provide 
PHP and MySQL? If not, then I don't think we can create a "Octave Central".

  Anyway, what I'm saying is that I'm willing to do some work on this, 
but it requires a specification of what we want, and a server to do 
things on. But I believe we could provide one web service that would be 
used instead of both octave.org and octave.sf.org

Søren