Re: Octave Forge -- Looking for a new leader

[c.]

Dear all,

Sorry for joining this discussion very late but my laptop
recently died and my access to email has been quite
difficult during these holidays ...

First of all let me join in thanking Carnë for his work in the 
last years, we have sometimes disagreed on some technical details
but I always greatly appreciated his tremendous commitment and
effort.

On 2 Jan 2017, at 12:58, Philip Nienhuis <address@hidden> wrote:

> Olaf Till wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 01, 2017 at 03:27:31PM -0800, PhilipNienhuis wrote:
>>> Sebastian Schöps wrote
>>>> 
>>>> Olaf Till-2 wrote

...

>> possible advantages for package maintainers of supported packages:
>> 
>> - repository is already available,
>> 
>> - common mailing list, common bug tracker, sometimes valuable help in
>>   fixing bugs,
>> 
>> - maintaining 'the' <some_topic>-package, instead of maintaining 'just
>>   another' <some_topic>-package,
>> 
>> - reputation of maintaining a supported package
> 
> Except maybe for the last two I fully agree (personally I don't care much for 
> those, to me it's primarily a nice hobby; and reputations earned can be good 
> or bad :-) ).
> 
> Philip

Let me add that the discussion about cathegorizing packages 
and moving responsability away from the OF leader(s) was already 
done long ago and reached almost the same conclusions as this thread. 

The discussion started at OctConf2012 and resulted in the design
of Octave Agora that was created soon after but was never completed.

I think it is very important to learn from past mistakes in order
to avoid a similar time- and resource-consuming failure.

My main suggestion based on previous history would be :

let's try to define what is the best set-up that we 
CAN get running and maintain given the limited resources 
available rather than trying to define all features we WANT
the "new OF" to have before we start developing it.

Sebastian's "minimalistic" suggestion does go in this direction.

I also recently looked into Julia's package development/distribution 
system as a model but got stuck when considering security issues.

my 0.02€
c.