Re: [OctDev] Octave-forge Development

[Quentin S. <qsp...@ie...>]

Mark P. Esplin wrote:

>I am trying to figure out how octave-forge development works.  For the main 
>part of octave, John Eaton set's the direction, adds patches etc., but how 
>about for octave-forge?  When I look at the "Octave-forge developer's guide" 
>at http://octave.sourceforge.net/ it has instructions for adding modules to 
>octave-forge. Does each module's author maintain the module?  I probably 
>don't have the ability or the time to add major modules to octave-forge, but 
>I can do some bug-fixes, documentation, etc.  How would I go about doing 
>that? Just having a few comments on what works and what doesn't seems like it 
>would be helpful.  Should this go on http://wiki.octave.org/?   Maybe we 
>could avoid some of the frustration expressed recently by Tom in his post to 
>he...@oc....
>  
>
This and another recent post by Dirk to the octave list about splitting 
octave-forge because of dependencies has got me thinking. Octave-forge 
has become quite large and includes some very stable as well as some 
bleeding-edge code. I seem to recall that John has expressed a desire to 
avoid adding too much extra stuff to the core octave distribution, while 
at the same time some of the octave-forge functions have become a 
necessity for many people (including myself). Many of them roughly 
approximate the MATLAB "toolboxes", and some of them comprise easy 
solutions to questions that seem to come up on help-octave at least 
weekly (how do I save a figure, etc...), so the evidence would suggest 
that it's not advertized well enough. I'm not sure about the solution to 
that problem, but I would like to suggest we split octave-forge into 
some smaller packages. Here's a suggestion:

"octave-extras" or "octave-toolboxes": a well-tested core of 
octave-forge with minimal external dependencies

"octave-geom" and "octave-symbolic": separate packages that depend on 
external packages (like GiNaC and qhull)

"octave-forge": bleeding edge stuff

I welcome any thoughts on this.

-Quentin