Octave-Forge: requirement for a maintainer Makefile for release

[Carnë Draug]

Hi everyone

As you will know, there is a requirement that Octave Forge packages to
have a clone of their repository in our project at sourceforge with,
at the very least, the state for the package releases.  However, this
sometimes doesn't happen and releases are requested with files that
are missing in the repository.

Many of the packages now have a Makefile at the root of the package
for maintainer tasks such as making a release.  I would propose to
make this a requirement to solve this issue --- since hg and git export
would not export files and changes not commited --- and to reduce the
work required for pushing a release --- since I would not have to check
this myself.

The plan would be that package maintainers would provide a revision
hash (or maybe a revision tag), and whoever is pushing the release
would build the actual release tarball.  The package maintainer would still
be responsible to upload the html documentation.

The only issue I see is with packages that may require a special tool
or a specific version of the tool.  Even different versions of autoconf
could generate slightly different configure scripts.  However, I am
guessing that in practice this will not happen and can be handled at
the time if they do.

Anyone has any more thoughts on this? Anyone opposes?

Carnë