Re: Octave-Forge bugs in the tracker?

[c.]

On 23 Jul 2011, at 19:00, address@hidden wrote:

> I think moving to Savannah is a good idea (SourceForge is particularly
> joyful to work with anyway). Regarding the name, then I was never really
> a fan of "Octave-Forge", so I wouldn't mind switching.

hi all,

I've been too busy lately to respond to this thread, but have been willing to 
do so for a while,
so I apologize in advance for the lengthy message covering different aspects of 
the topic in a disordered way.

It seems the majority of those who spoke on this topic have an opposite point 
of view, 
but actually I'm not a great fan of having octave-forge and octave too close 
together,
I think they are two different projects and that it would be convenient to keep 
it so.

For example many of those who contribute to octave-forge or that contributed in 
the past
would not have done so if requirements for acessing octave-forge would not have 
been much 
less strict than those for octave (in terms of coding standards, licensing 
terms etc.)  

Still many of those contributions where picked-up by Octave developers and 
migrated to the main 
project.

I agree that jwe that many problems in the past have been created by the too 
strong similarity,
e.g. a website that is called http://octave.sf.net (rather than 
octave-forge.sf.net) and has links 
to octave binaries on its front page does indeed contribute to the confusion. 

One more thing to consider is that, especially taking into account the VERY 
limited work force taking 
care of octave-forge at the moment, I would suggest to think twice before 
making "revolutionary" changes 
that would require a non negligible amount of work.
OF is a quite successful project that, thanks to the great hard work done by 
many in the past, currently gets on
with very little effort by very few people (mostly Søren only).
Sure, there is lots of ways OF can and should be improved, but past attempts to 
throw it all away and start 
over have not gone very far (e.g. did agora ever actually take off?).
I see no problem in moving from sourceforge to savannah, but I would carefully 
check how many changes this would require
and how much work it would take. 

Finally I am not sure that having a single bug tracker for all octave-forge 
packages makes any sense.
The current approach is to let each package maintainer take care of his/her own 
packages and be responsible for their status.
Often when users report bugs in the mailing list, they are instructed to 
contact the package maintainer directly.
I even doubt many package maintainers would ever look into the common bug 
tracker.


Just my two cents,
c.