[Pkg-octave-devel] RFP bugs and Git workflow

[Sébastien Villemot]

Hi,

I was looking at the RFP bugs that are related to Octave and there are
four such, for the following Octave Forge packages: java¹, jhandles²
tcl-octave³ and quaternion.⁴ These bugs were initially ITPs submitted by
Rafael before he retired, and they have been automatically requalified
as RFP since. It turns out that there are already Git repositories for
these 3 packages on Alioth.n

I would be interested in finishing the packaging of these, probably
starting from the easiest one, namely quaternion.

Before doing so, I wanted to know if you have any opinion on the
relevance of this work and of issues that may arise. I don't really know
these packages, so please excuse my ignorance. The last release of
"quaternion" and "tcl-octave" was in 2009, so I don't know they are
still maintained. "java" seems well maintained, and browsing the web
there seem to be potentially several users of Debian and
Debian-derivatives who could benefit from it being packaged. "jhandles"
is not on Octave-forge: has it been deprecated?

Also, concerning the packaging workflow, and following a previous
discussion, I would like to know if it is ok if I use git-buildpackage
and its recommended workflow for my future work.⁵ In its simplest form,
it keeps two branches: one for upstream, and one for Debian packaging
(including both upstream sources and debian/ dir). My understanding is
that all our packages currently only have the debian/ dir in git, except
"octave-symbolic" which seems to follow the git-buildpackage
layout. IIRC, switching to git-with-upstream was part of our initial
plan, but I wanted to make sure this is still ok for you.

Best,

¹ http://bugs.debian.org/468540
² http://bugs.debian.org/468541
³ http://bugs.debian.org/529732
⁴ http://bugs.debian.org/482615
⁵ http://wiki.debian.org/PackagingWithGit

-- 
Sébastien Villemot
CEPREMAP - Paris School of Economics
Homepage: http://www.dynare.org/sebastien
Landline phone: +33 1 40 77 49 90
SIP phone: sebastien.villemot at ekiga.net
PGP Key: 2069 1DFC C2C9 8C47 9529  84EE 0001 8C22 381A 7594
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