Re: Octave-Forge: requirement for a maintainer Makefile for release

[Juan Pablo Carbajal]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 8:59 PM, Carnë Draug <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi everyone
>
> As you will know, there is a requirement that Octave Forge packages to
> have a clone of their repository in our project at sourceforge with,
> at the very least, the state for the package releases.  However, this
> sometimes doesn't happen and releases are requested with files that
> are missing in the repository.
>
> Many of the packages now have a Makefile at the root of the package
> for maintainer tasks such as making a release.  I would propose to
> make this a requirement to solve this issue --- since hg and git export
> would not export files and changes not commited --- and to reduce the
> work required for pushing a release --- since I would not have to check
> this myself.
>
> The plan would be that package maintainers would provide a revision
> hash (or maybe a revision tag), and whoever is pushing the release
> would build the actual release tarball.  The package maintainer would still
> be responsible to upload the html documentation.
>
> The only issue I see is with packages that may require a special tool
> or a specific version of the tool.  Even different versions of autoconf
> could generate slightly different configure scripts.  However, I am
> guessing that in practice this will not happen and can be handled at
> the time if they do.
>
> Anyone has any more thoughts on this? Anyone opposes?
>
> Carnë
>
I support this, it also brings us closer to an url based installation procedure.