Re: octave on development level

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On Tue, 2013-10-01 at 10:30 +0400, Dmitry Roshchin wrote:
> On Sunday 29 September 2013 15:45:33 Dmitry Roshchin wrote:
> > On Sunday 29 September 2013 00:38:23 Werner Koenig wrote:
> > > I want to install a parallel version of octave on development level on my
> > > openSuse 12.3 distribution. So I get the source via
> > 
> > If I'll have some free time next week, I can create octave-unstable packages
> > for openSUSE.
> 
> The main question - do we really need parallel installation?

I understand that you're impatient to get the GUI and that for this
reason you want to install and distribute the Octave development
version to all openSUSE users. We've had this situation in the past
before when 2.1 was the stable Octave release but everyone was using
the 2.9 release which at the time was dubbed "development", and this
was the situation for a couple of years.

However, I think we're doing a bit better about releasing this time,
and talk on the maintainers' list seems to be that the release is
actually really happening now. GSoC is over, new influx of features
seems to be slowing down, stability seems reasonably good, and the GUI
is looking better than ever.

I would therefore recommend to wait just a little bit longer so you
can just upgrade the current stable package with a new stable Octave
release. That way you would not need to worry about maintaining two
Octave versions at once.

If you really cannot wait any longer to have newer Octave packages,
then at least I exhort you you package the current dev version with
sufficient flexibility to turn it into a stable replacement Octave
release.

Furthermore, we are always hoping to keep a close relationship with
our downstream distributors. If you're packaging Octave for openSUSE,
please say hi on the Octave maintainers' list <address@hidden>
and let us know what you're planning to do exactly.

- Jordi G. H.