Re: kernel density smoother?

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 5:10 PM, forkandwait <address@hidden> wrote:
>> a good indication that people shouldn't
>> declare me the Octave-Forge leader). Concrete ideas on how to improve
>> the situation are, however, most welcome as it is a problem that
>> concerns me.
>
> I guess I may have been a little "flip" in my comments.  I am not sure strong
> leadership is necessarily the answer, though it might help.  What is great
> about Python is that there is a SINGLE, documented, well defined standard
> library.

It's basically the same with Octave, I think.

> This library grows steadily, but there is a discussion process before
> something makes it into the library, there are votes on where it goes, and 
> then
> it is documented/ enforced / distributed at the same level as the language
> itself.  And whenever there is no clear consensus or the process gets bogged
> down, Guido reserves the right to declare by fiat what should happen.
>
> In this particular example, I would NOT have voted to have the kernel density
> smoother function in the econometrics package, but rather in either statistics
> or core. And I would have statistics ALWAYS distributed with the main package.

And I would vote against it. I think that it's better to have just the
basic statistical functions in core Octave.
We usually do sort of a ballot before making significant changes to
the core library. Last year, the finance & control pkgs were removed,
for instance.

> But I definitely think it belongs with a standard distribution of octave, and
> its code should be tracked in the main source.  Same with textread.

Textread is now part of Octave.

>  Same
> probably with csv2cell, after a process of deciding to put it into the 
> standard
> library, even though the other large competitor doesn't have it in their
> distribution (which might be a criteria for inclusion).  Etc.
>

I don't know what it should do, but feel free to propose it to be included.

> THere are several "levels" of library -- planet python (or whatever it is
> called) is where random people put up their scripts.   Then scripts that get
> used regularly get adopted into the inner circle and tracked with the main
> source.
>
> I don't have a surplus of time or skill, but I have a LOT of free soft karma 
> to
> repay if I can help.
>



-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek, PhD
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz