Re: bug tracking

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2010/3/2 John W. Eaton <address@hidden>:
> On  2-Mar-2010, Jordi Guti rrez Hermoso wrote:
>
> | Are you still averse to the idea of merging that website with
> | octave.org ? I thought that historically they were separate because
> | you wanted to keep a close watch on the quality of code that got
> | labelled as "Octave". I'd like it if all got merged together or was
> | more closely and obviously affiliated (think of the questions in the
> | user list about people asking for this or that function and apparently
> | not aware that it's implemented in Octave-forge).
>
> One problem with merging is licensing.  Octave is part of the GNU
> project.  We don't want to host any non-free stuff as part of the
> Octave project on savannah.

Well, octave-forge is all free licenses, isn't it? I certainly don't
remember any DFSG problems during the little Debian packaging I've
done on it.

Additionally, it's not a big problem to require people to submit code
only under free licenses.

Octave itself doesn't collect legal papers from contributors like
other GNU software, does it?

> A similar situation might be autoconf and the autoconf macro archive.
> Should all of the contributed macros be hosted as part of the autoconf
> project?

Well, perhaps not directly, but the project could say "if you want
more Octave code, this is probably a good place to look, but
'downloader beware', code may be abandoned, may be under a different
(free) license, may not even work at all." Although this is generally
not the case for most Octave-forge code.

I still want a core/packages/anything-goes separation of the code
archive, but with pointers all around how to go from one part of the
archive to another.

> Another concern I have is with people contributing code and abandoning
> it.  How do the Octave Forge maintainers deal with that problem?  I
> know that I don't want to become the default maintainer for all
> contributed Octave packages.

Some Octave-forge code is old and semi-abandoned, some isn't. But this
is true of all code everywhere. ;-)