Re: 3.6.0 release

[marco atzeri]

On 11/24/2011 8:01 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 22-Nov-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>
> | On 22 November 2011 16:36, John W. Eaton  wrote:
> |
> |>  If you know of important problems that should be fixed, please make
> |>  sure they are in the bug tracker and listed with a serverity of
> |>  important or blocker.
> |
> | I have one. Or three. Binary packaging. Can we really concentrate on
> | making sure binary packaging is working on the three major platforms
> | before we announce a new release?
>
> If we had waited for binaries for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE,
> Windows, and OS X before announcing Octave 3.4.0, then we would still
> not have a release announcement.

Hi John,
I agree that you should not wait.

As maintainer of cygwin octave (and most math dependency libraries)
packages, I see binary packaging as the step after upstream release.

Binaries distribution could have additional requiremenst of
synchronization with general release plans or other packages
release that we can not control/predict in advance and at the end
relies on our time availability.
For cygwin, if I am not available no one will release on my behalf.

Linux distros will probably have larger teams but more synchronization
and package check issues than me.

> | It's a little frustrating to have a
> | new release that most users can't access because there are no easily
> | accessible binaries. It produces a lot of bug reports on old versions.
>
> Yes, it is frustrating that there haven't been binary packages.  But
> the Octave project doesn't control packaging for any systems.  At
> least some of the GNU/Linux distributions tell us that they don't want
> us doing packaging for them and as a group, we have no way to do
> packaging for OS X or Windows, at least that I know of so we have to
> rely on volunteers.  If that should change, then how should it change?
> If we as a group are going to be distributing binaries, then how will
> we as a group build them?  I don't want to be in the position that we
> must rely on a single individual to do packaging in order for us to
> announce a release.

To build packages for any distro you need to be involved in the
specific distro packaging community, as guideline consistency
is a general requirement for any binary package acceptance.

> jwe

Marco