[octave forge] releasing and template Makefiles

[JuanPi]

Hi all,

It seems ot me that the latest update tested our pipeline for releases
in Octave Forge.
As expected an institution built on people's voluntary time
contribution, cannot have great control schemes, and this is showing
in Octave Forge.

So how we speed up and make easier the release process?

1. Olaf mentioned that non-admin can help in the review process. How?
I would be willing to do it, but I have no clue where are the
tools/procedures to review releases.

2. Our developer tools are good but still too mangled. I tried to help
with the Makefiles, but got demotivated by the constant effort to make
a complicated Makefiel that covers all possible cases. My suggestion
is that we split Makefile sin use cases and offer all the templates,
instread of just one for all. the cases Is se are: Makefile_<cvs>_<pkg
content>.
Where <cvs> is one of {mercurial, git} and <pkg_content> is one of
{mfileonly, C-C++-FORTRAN, nonOFdependencies}.
The last two would be also distributed with an example bootstrap and
configure script, this is for example for packages like odepkg
(SUNDIALS) or packages that depedn oin python modules.
We can start with the simple Makefile_git Makefile_mercurial to reduce
the complexity of the current offered Makefile template.

Another issue is that the user's .octaverc is not loaded, supposedly
to increase reproducibility. I understand this in the case of
compiling or preparing the documentation. however I do not see the
point of doing this also for the "install" or the "run" rule. Both
things should use the user configs to test possible environments (e.g.
I could have several rc files and install and run with those). I do
not see how install and run have to be reproducible, the packages are
isntalled and run in different environments.

Regards,


-- 
JuanPi Carbajal
https://goo.gl/ayiJzi

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