Re: octave on development level

[Dmitry Roshchin]

On Tuesday 01 October 2013 11:33:12 Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> 
> 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.

Personally I don't need GUI for octave, but many people are asking about 
unstable versions. openSUSE provides some unstable software for beta testing 
(usually as big  as KDE or GNOME). So I want to provide development versions 
in our science repository. It's quite easy to maintain two octave versions in 
the case of nonparallel installation, in any case such packages are ready.