[Pkg-octave-devel] Presentation of Debian Science/Octave/Scilab/Scicomp, roundtable on free software

[Rafael Laboissiere]

I am writing on the behalf of the DOG (Debian Octave Group).

* Christophe Prud'homme <prudhomm at debian.org> [2008-10-02 10:27]:

> I was wondering if there are some presentation of Debian Science and the 
> Octave team  available, and in particular information like the following
>   - objectives, 

* Package all Octave-related software available out there, besides Octave
  itself.
* Develop tools for integrating the packages together both at installation
  time (end-user side) as at built time (developer side). Four further
  information, see our web page [1]

>   - policies, 

The DOG has a Guidelines document [2], although it is slightly outdated and
does not include the information related to the recentely added octave-forge
packages and the octave-pkg-dev helper package.

>   - how it functions, 

The DOG is an Alioth project.  The main interactions among developers happen
in the pkg-octave-devel mailing list [3].  We have a common SVN repository
for all packages [4].

>   - common issues faced during software packaging( licensing, technical 
> issues, build system, upstream...), eg. Salomé issues

We have very little licensing problems, since most of our packages are under
the GPL.  Usually, our packages need very few patches.  The upstream authors
are quite involved with us.  The members of the DOG participate quite
actively in the upstream mailing lists.

>   - some numbers: 
>     o approximate number of working on the project, 

What is a "number of working"?  Do you mean "number of people"?  If yes, see
below.

>     o approximate number of people in mailings lists, 

pkg-octave-devel has currently 18 subscribers.

>     o origin of the people: continents represented, number of countries 
> represented 

The three currently active developers come from Europe (Iceland, German, and
France).  There are other 13 dormant developers listed as members of the DOG
at Alioth, but I cannot tell you accurately where they come from.

>     o number of packages maintained

Currently 59 (most of them are Octave-forge [5] packages).

[1] http://pkg-octave.alioth.debian.org/
[2] http://pkg-octave.alioth.debian.org/DOG-Guidelines.html
[3] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-octave-devel
[4] http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-octave/
[5] http://octave.sf.net

-- 
Rafael