Re: Merging Octave and Octave-Forge?

[Søren Hauberg]

tir, 26 08 2008 kl. 11:41 -0400, skrev John W. Eaton:
> On 25-Aug-2008, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> |    As I've recently announced a new release of Octave-Forge has just  
> | been made. Whenever I make these releases the same thought pops up in  
> | my head: "why does Octave-Forge even exist?".
> 
> I think it exists because several people thought I was too slow to
> accept contributed code in the core Octave distribution.  Also, it is
> nice to have a place where people can work collaboratively on
> contributed code.  Much of that code is domain specific and not really
> suitable for the core Octave distribution in any case.

I'm not advocating that the packages should be distributed as part of
the code Octave distribution. I just think it would be a lot more nice
if there was only one entry point to Octave (instead of two as we have
today). I don't want to change the way packages are developed, I think
that part works quite good.

> | Personally, I use the function reference
> |      on the Octave-Forge website quite a bit, and I also find the doxygen 
> stuff
> |      useful. I don't see why this stuff isn't on the Octave website.
> 
> Because no one has put it there?

And I wouldn't mind putting it there (i.e. I'd be willing to do the
work). Actually I would like to move as much of the Octave-Forge web
site onto octave.org if possible. However, I don't want to work on both
www.octave.org and octave.sf.net as that is simply too much work (and
web stuff is really boring...).

Today, I guess I do most of the work on octave.sf.net, and I'm not
really doing a particular good job. So, it seems to me that nobody want
to do the web stuff, which is why I would like to get rid of the
octave.sf.net web page -- then there would only be one page to work on.

> If they are merged, then you are effectively saying that the
> contributed packages are part of the (GNU) Octave project, so then I
> think the packages would need to all agree to the principles of the
> GNU project in the same way as I did when I agreed to make Octave a
> GNU project.  Is that what you (and all current and future
> contributors) want?

Now this is a really good point! I hadn't thought about that. While I'm
a huge fan of GNU, I don't know if such an agreement would scare
potential contributors away. We have a few non-Free packages on
octave-forge, and I don't think these should be thrown away.

> I'm not sure savannah is much better, but I recently found that they
> now support Mercurial so I'm hoping to be able to move my public
> archive there (there will still be a redirect from octave.org).

The problem with sourceforge is that you have to upload each package
manually -- since we have approx. 75 packages, that process is a bit
tedious...

Søren