Re: closing Octave-Forge svn repository

[Carnë Draug]

On 5 March 2016 at 20:43, Alexander Barth <address@hidden> wrote:
> Carnë,
>
> Can you move my repositories (cgi, ncarray, netcdf and octcdf) to git
> rather than hg)?

I won't have time for this any time soon.  But if you have a git clone
of them somewhere else I can replace it.  If not, I have heard that
there's extensions for git and mercurial (so you can use git commands
on a mercurial repository and vice versa) but I don't have any experience
with any to recommend.

> Personally, I find it quite demotivating that these changes where made
> without approval of the package maintainers (for the actively
> maintained packages at least). Has the package maintainer nothing to
> say which tools he is supposed to use? I really doubt that other
> scripting languages mandate which version control system you have to
> use for your software repository (in order to be visible by the
> package manager).

The scripting language mandates nothing.  The Octave Forge project does.
And it also does not request a specific VCS, it only requests that it's
a distributed one (and that means no subversion).  I'm sorry I don't have
time to make the conversion to git now, but I did last week (for example,
I converted the ocs package to git as requested).

Finally, pkg will accept files as input, a package does not need to be part
of Octave Forge (I personally develop two packages that I do not distribute
via Octave Forge and I'm involved in one other).

It's kind of ironic that you're complaining about this move forcing
something on you when the whole point of it is letting you do whatever
you want.  Using a distributed VCS means you have the development done
wherever you want, and only need to push to OF for the releases.  And
it is part of a long-term plan of having a repository for Octave package
that is independent of the current Octave Forge.

> It is only now that I see your message, but it seem that you already
> made this change only 3 days afters announcing it. I already mentioned
> in the past that I did not want my packages to be moved.

Which is why it took 3 years to move yours and why they were on the last
batch of packages to be converted.

Carnë