[Pkg-octave-devel] State of the Union

[Rafael Laboissiere]

0. Greetings
============

Happy New Year to all members of the DOG and to people lurking this
mailing list.


1. Current state of the packages
================================

As good news for the beginning of 2006, all the Octave-related (besides
octaviz and sundials) have the same version in unstable and testing.
Thanks to all the people who worked hard to get the packages at this
state.

As you probably know, the Debian project is heading towards the release
of etch in December 2006.  It sounds like a lot of time from now, but
time seems to go faster in volunteered projects.  It would then be good
to make some planning at this point.

The sundials package will enter testing in one week.  The octaviz package
is waiting for the new vtk packages, which has undergone the xlibs-dev
and the C++ ABI transitions.  I expect that by the end of January the
situation will be settled.


2. Bugs
=======

We are doing well as regards the bug reports (see
http://bugs.debian.org/pkg-octave-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org).  All
bugs have been addressed some way.  From the eleven open bug reports,
eight are tagged "upstream" (most of them are "fixed-upstream").  Two bug
reports are tagged "moreinfo" and will be closed in a reasonable
timeframe.  The only bug report that needs attention soon is:

    #340428: octave2.9 - lists mailing list as uploader in changelog
    
I will address it in the next week or so.  


3. Release goals for etch
=========================

I think we should now concentrate our energies in getting all add-on
packages working for both octave2.1 and octave2.9.  This should be our
main release goal for etch.  Some discussion has already taken place as
regards splitting the octave-forge package into octave2.1-forge,
octave2.9, and octave-forge-common (or whichever the names we choose).

I think it is important to get octave2.9 in a fully usable state in
Debian.  This will probably help the upstream maintainers to release
Octave 3.0 and I hope it will happen before etch freezes.


4. Further packaging work
=========================

I would love to see more Octave-related packages in Debian.  In
particular, it would be great to package all those graphics-related
projects out there.  Octplot is the first obvious one.  Its package has
been rejected by the ftp-master admins due to copyright problems.  There
are also other packages like octave-gtk and octave-fltk around.  By
packaging such stuff for Debian, we will show to our users that Octave is
a viable replacement for its industry clone (a.k.a. Matlab).

Of course, there are many other interesting projects listed in
http://pkg-octave.alioth.debian.org/#stuff.  Please, update this list
or, even better, build the packages!


Yours octavely,

-- 
Rafael