Re: Octave odepkg

[Carlo De Falco]

> 
> Il giorno 28 ott 2020, alle ore 07:56, Kai Torben Ohlhus <k.ohlhus@gmail.com> 
> ha scritto:
> 
> Greetings Carlo,
> 
> In yesterdays developer meeting [1] the topic came up, that the odepkg
> 0.8.5 hosted at SourceForge is still part of the MXE Octave MS Windows
> builds.  Unfortunately, it causes a failure when testing/using the
> package [2].
> 
> Do you agree to remove the odepkg from MXE Octave, as large portions are
> already part of Octave core?
> 
> Another question is the latest development repository.  It used to be on
> BitBucket [3], but they shut down Mercurial repositories, thus it is
> unavailable.  Is there a new location available or any plans for further
> development?
> 
> Kai
> 
> [1] https://wiki.octave.org/Online_Developer_Meeting_(2020-10-27)
> [2] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?59338
> [3] https://wiki.octave.org/Odepkg

Hi Kai,

First of all, as you noted, the significance of odepkg has changed a lot
over time.

odepkg used to be the place to go to find (almost) matlab compatible
ODE solvers for Octave.

Now, most matlab compatible solvers have been made much more compatible and 
moved to core,
so what is left in the package is mainly a collection of very specific advanced 
methods for some niche problems.

Also the repository on SourceForge is out of date and may conflict with the 
core functions.

So, YES, definitely the SF version of odepkg should be removed from MXE.
And probably very few people will miss it.

That does not mean, though that  development of odepkg, will be abandoned,
that is indeed planned, although it will require a major overhaul to simplify 
odepkg 
an make it more maintainable, 

I was aware bitbucket was going to phase out mercurial, but nonetheless I 
forgot to move my stuff out of there ...
I'll move the repo to GIT as soon as possible.

All the best,
c.

P.S.    I also think odepkg should be removed from OctaveForge alltogether, 
pkg-index is a much more suitable place to distribute it from