Re: Matlab central and octave

[Søren Hauberg]

John W. Eaton skrev:
> [Discussion moved from the help list]
>
> With the package system for Octave, I can see the need for a
> repository of contributed packages.  This repository could be hosted
> at the Octave Forge site, but having a package available in the
> repository should require that the package development is hosted at
> Octave Forge.  Some people may prefer to have their package
> development hosted elsewhere, or not even publicly available.
>
> A prototype of the new Octave Forge site is here:
>
>   http://octave.dbateman.org
>
> Check the packages link for the current list of packages.  I think
> the development of all these packages is currently hosted at the
> Octave Forge site.  How difficult would it be to include "other"
> packages that are not developed at the Octave Forge site in the new
> package distribution page?  If we make that change, then perhaps there
> should be a clearer separation between the collaborative development
> site (Octave Forge) and the Octave package repository.  Perhaps then
> people would begin to see Octave Forge as a collaborative development
> site and not as the only way to make contributed code available.
Getting code into octave-forge is fairly easy, but it requires contact 
with other human beings, which can be scary and takes time. So we could 
use a web page where people can publish their code with any human 
interaction.

I'm not a huge fan of hosting such a system on sourceforge though. Other 
sourceforge projects try to run my dynamic web pages using php (or 
similar) but it's horribly slow on the SF servers. So, I think such a 
system (should it ever come to exist) should run on some other server 
than SF.

Today Octave-forge is IMHO kinda part of octave. It's like octave-forge 
packages are unofficially blessed by the octave community. I think this 
is a good thing -- if I download a package from octave-forge I can at 
least expect it to work fairly well.

If we had an "Octave Central" I think we should introduce a hierarchy:

  "Octave" is stable code that everybody can use
                    |
                    |
  "Octave-Forge" is a stable set of packages for people with specific 
needs (image processing, etc)
                    |
                    |
  "Octave Central" is user commited code where you shouldn't expect the 
highest quality of code.

> In any case, I strongly agree with David that we need some people to
> come forward and take on some of these kinds of tasks, otherwise it is
> highly unlikely that anything will happen.
I would expect that Free software exists for similar needs, so I don't 
think we would have to start from scratch. One large issue I see is 
still access to a decent server.

Søren