Re: Octave-forge: you get what you pay for

[John W. Eaton]

On 15-Jun-2005, Keith Goodman wrote:

| Many
| of the functions that you are using in Octave started in Octave-Forge.
| That process, by design, leaves Octave-Forge with the functions that
| are more difficult to maintain.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that.  I'd say it is more likely that
Octave forge contains the functions that either don't belong in the
core Octave distribution, or they are functions that have not been
polished or adapted to the Octave coding standards.  We recently had a
discussion about moving more of the core functions from Octave forge
to Octave:

  http://www.octave.org/mailing-lists/octave-maintainers/2005/261

We could still use help in getting the functions listed in that
message merged with the core Octave distribution.

On a related topic, it would be useful to have a packaging system for
contributed Octave code.  That would allow people to independently
distribute collections of functions.  Octave forge would still be
useful as a place for collaborative deveoplment, but we would not be
restricted to a monolithic Octave plus a monolithic Octave forge
collection.  Given a functioning package system, there are a number of
things that could be removed from Octave and placed in independent
packages.

If you'd like to discuss either of these topics in detail, please
follow up on the maintainers list.

Thanks,

jwe



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