Re: Octave-Forge bugs in the tracker?

[c.]

Hi,
First of all, I am happy OF is being given some attention and some serious 
thought!

On 23 Jul 2011, at 20:45, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

> On 23 July 2011 13:13, c. <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> <...>

> Our users disagree with this all the time. And most of the time, so do
> we.

As I said before, I am aware my point of view is not shared by most Octave
developers, I don't expect everyone to change their mind and I will gladly 
adapt to whatever
is decided by the majority, especially as I have been contributing very little 
lately.
I just think that pointing out a different point of view might help consider 
all aspects more carefully.


> When they say, "I want to accomplish such and such task", how
> often are we able to not mention some Octave-Forge package?

In the case of Matlab, the Mathwoks would answer "you need to purchase 
a separate license for an additional specific toolbox". So our answer "you need
to download an additional package from OF" still sounds nicer ;)

> The
> separation between Octave and Octave-Forge is awkward and is
> unnecessarily segregating our very small community.

I see your point, but rather than "segregating" I would describe that 
as "differentiating tasks and interests"

> <...>
> If Octave-Forge were hosted in Savannah, there is no requirement to
> follow GNU coding standards, and any license is fine as long as it's
> GPL-compatible, which Octave-Forge packages have to be anyways except
> for the non-free ones nobody uses.

I didn't mean that as an argument against moving to savannah (which I do not 
oppose), 
but rather for keeping Octave and Octave-Forge well separated.
As for licensing, although I have personally no interest in helping 
maintain and distribute non-free software, it has happened in the past 
that a user first uploaded the code under some different license and was
later convinced to move to GPL.

> 
> The amount of work to do here is very limited. Moving from SourceForge
> to Savannah is basically just re-uploading the code and updating a few
> urls in the web pages.

most webpages are automatically generated by Søren's generate-html package
and are hard-coded in the package source, so that should also be updated.

a new procedure for uploading package releases should also be chosen and 
documented 
as the current one (which, I agree, is not at all optimal) is very dependent 
on sourceforge features. 

I'm sure other things will come out as soon as we look into this in more detail.

> I don't see a reason to move the web hosting.


I would not like to mix services from savannah and sourceforge, 
especially if that requires contributors to subscribe to both.
I don't see how having the project spread through different hosting
services could help reduce rather than increase the confusion. 
 
> 
>> (e.g. did agora ever actually take off?).
> 
> Agora is not a project to replace Octave-Forge, and I still work on it
> a little now and then, but no, it hasn't really taken off.
Too bad, I think the idea was (still is) great.

> But hey, if Duke Nukem Forever and HURD are making releases, why not
> Agora? ;-)
OK, it is OT, but I am wearing a GNU-HURD t-shirt right now ;)

> 
>> Finally I am not sure that having a single bug tracker for all
>> octave-forge packages makes any sense. The current approach is to
>> let each package maintainer take care of his/her own packages and be
>> responsible for their status. Often when users report bugs in the
>> mailing list, they are instructed to contact the package maintainer
>> directly. I even doubt many package maintainers would ever look into
>> the common bug tracker.
> 
> This only works for the packages that actually have a dedicated
> maintainer, which most don't. Thomas Weber recently droped a bunch of
> Octave-Forge Debian packages because they were unmaintained.
> 
> We can always tell Savannah to CC a particular maintainer when a bug
> discussion starts, the maintainer can then go to Savannnah and follow
> that bug there.

Technically, how would that be done? If on savannah there is an automatic way 
of forwarding bugs to the appropriate package maintainer that sounds like a 
very nice feature.

> As for the rest, we can use a collaborative
> maintenance approach where we have a common publicly available list of
> problems so that anyone can go to that list and take care of the
> problems.

Sourceforge has its own bug tracking system and it was suggested in the past to 
use
that rather than the mailing list. It just did not happen. Althogh I agree that
the savannah web interface looks better, do you think that would be sufficient 
to make a difference?

> There are a number of Octave-Forge packages I would like to
> patch myself, but I find Octave-Forge unwieldy to work with right now.

If you have patches ready, please send them to the mailing list, 
I'll be more than happy to apply them for you if you don't want to get 
involved with the sourceforge tools.

> - Jordi G. H.

c.