Re: Concurrent maintenance of the Octave packaging

[Ben Abbott]

On Oct 1, 2011, at 9:07 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

> Talking to jwe in #octave in IRC, he brought up an interesting point.
> Why don't we maintain the Octave packaging for various platforms
> (Macintosh OS X, Windows, debs and rpms) inside the Octave tree? And
> build them regularly? Even offer "use at your own risk" built debs and
> rpms from octave.org?
> 
> The rationale is this: we can regularly check the status of the
> packaging and update it incrementally, possibly share maintenance.
> This is better than waiting for major releases and pile a lot of
> packaging work all at once.
> 
> I am CCing the Debian Octave mailing list, because it's the one I more
> or less work with myself. I get the impression most packagers are
> listening in on the Octave maintainers' list, but if you know of a
> packager who isn't, please contact them. The rest of what I will say
> is mostly Debian-specific.
> 
> I know that the usual Debian practice is to strip the debian/
> directory if a source tarball contains it, but that's usually because
> there isn't very good communication between Debian and upstream. Now
> that we're actually moving towards keeping the tarball source with the
> Debian packaging, perhaps this can be an overall good move? This
> should ease the burden of packaging if it's shared between Octave and
> Debian developers.
> 
> - Jordi G. H.

The package managers on MacOS don't use debs. Instead, the package managers 
(Fink & MacPorts) build and install from source.

Is the idea to provide a autotools build of a MacOS app bundle, and (?) a MacOS 
disk image?

Ben