Re: How to contribute a new package to Octave Forge

[Mike Miller]

On Fri, Mar 06, 2020 at 17:42:06 +0100, Olaf Till wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 05, 2020 at 08:26:55PM +0100, Reinhard wrote:
> > I would like to contribute a new package to Octave Forge. It contains
> > several utility functions related to process creation, parallel
> > execution of functions, design of experiment, plotting, interpolation,
> > command line parsing and others. It is the first, but not the only
> > package, I want to contribute. I want to make this package an external
> > package.
> 
> Personally I'm sceptical because your package seems to be too
> heterogeneous. It sounds as if the components should rather be
> contributed to existing packages or Octave core, if they are
> fitting. Even if you intend the package to be external.
> 
> But if you have a different opinion and want to convince the octave
> forge maintainers of it, maybe you should make your code accessible
> and give a more detailed description.

I am personally in favor of a more distributed approach to adding
packages to Octave, and someone who has contributed both to packages in
Octave Forge and completely external to it. Please keep in mind that an
external package doesn't have to be part of Octave Forge at all.

This proposed package sounds like a "general utility" package, which is
a perfectly good idea and may be useful, but I agree with Olaf probably
isn't suited for Octave Forge, at least not initially until it's maybe
refined more to have a well defined purpose.

As a comparison, I maintain my own package of general utility functions
called "octave-goodies", but I don't intend to have it included in
Octave Forge. If someone wants to use my 'basename' or 'grep' functions,
they can install it easily enough from my repository.

I also maintain the Pythonic package, which does have a very specific
purpose, and may be listed on Octave Forge in the future, but for now I
am happy maintaining it completely outside of the Forge.

I have other ideas for more specific packages, such as Linux resource
limit functions, D-Bus functions, and if those are developed to be
specific enough and suited for general use, I may propose them for
inclusion in Octave Forge someday.

Cheers,

-- 
mike

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature