Dear all,
I'm glad to join the discussion. Thanks for putting doctest on OctaveForge.
Now that doctest is easily available on OctaveForge, I feel like the most pragmatic approach is to encourage core developers to use it as part of their development process and see how this works out. From the perspective of the core developers, this shouldn't make much of a difference (doctest should "just work" out of the box), but it will allow Colin and myself to quickly iterate with regards to resolving small bugs and adding missing features while staying compatible with Matlab and Octave 3.8.x.
If this eventually leads to sufficient interest and adoption by the core developers then we can together hash out an appropriate plan for making doctest part of Octave core (and also factor out functionality that is common to both test and doctest, as Oliver mentioned). I concur with Colin that this will only be worth it if core developers are motivated in having most @examples being valid doctests.
At that point we can also discuss if there is sufficient interest in maintaining a separate Matlab/Octave 3.8.x backport (or if we simply want to freeze the last github version).
What do you think?
Best wishes,
Michael