Test web-site of new octave-forge web-site including all packages

[John W. Eaton]

On 10-Oct-2006, David Bateman wrote:

| If you'd like to see what Soren and I have been working on for
| octave-forge and the package manager, please look at the test website
| http://octave.dbateman.org I'm hosting on my home machine.

This is looking good, and I think it will help a lot to allow people
to download and install just the packages that they want rather than
encouraging everything from Octave Forge to be installed at once.

Here are some comments:

I think it is fine to have a page that looks similar to the Octave web
page, but to avoid confusion, perhaps we should at least use a
different graphic.  Would someone out there like to propose a logo of
some sort to use for the Octave Forge pages?

Given a package file foo-1.0.0.tar.gz, can we make it unpack in a
directory called foo-1.0.0?  That way there is less room for surprise
and confusion when downloading the package and unpacking it by hand,
just to look at it.  I'm not expecting that the package manager will
install the file in a directory with the version number appended.  It
is especially surprising (to me) that the package
splines-gcvspl-1.0.0.tar.gz unpacks in a directory called splines
rather than splines-gcvspl-1.0.0 or even splines-gcvspl.

What should we do about the "nonfree" packages?  The parts that are
actually linked with Octave and have a non-free license can't be
included in binary packages of Octave, and I belive that distributing
them as source files and asking the user to do the link could be
considered contributory infringement of the GPL.  We have had to
remove similar code from Octave in the past due to license
restrictions, so I would ask that the nonfree code that must be linked
with Octave be removed from Octave Forge.

jwe