[Pkg-octave-devel] New potential packager

[Thomas Weber]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 08:12:19PM +0100, Juan Pablo Carbajal wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am learning how to do packages for Debian. My initial objective was
> to help speeding up the packaging of octave versions but apparently
> that is kind of "covered". So it seems I will help packaging Octave
> forge packages that needs to be packaged.
> 
> In this regards I have the following question. Is it needed that all
> Octave Forge (OF) are packaged? I mean I see in the wiki lots of
> complaints and warnings about packages that are only a bunch of
> m-files and those could be managed within Octave easily without extra
> burden to this group.

It depends. The main issue of octave-forge is that people are very
eager to create a new package. Several months later, that package is
unmaintained.[1] There are some other issues (try to guess what's in
"octcdf" compared to "statistics"), but in the end, it boils down to:
"The group of contributors to octave-forge is very heterogenous in about
every aspect of software development".
The real question is whether that's a problem. If there is one large
"unmaintained" directory, would that help or hurt? I don't know. What I
do know is that it makes no sense at all to upload these packages in
Debian - they are so special that no one is willing to care for them in
the first place.

> Is it sensible to categorize packages in relation to their dependency
> on external libraries? Like stand-alone (which wouldn't require a
> Debian package) and "dependent" (or something of that sort) for the
> ones that depend on externals library and require a more exhaustive
> dependency control?

I would say "no", but I am not sure I understand what you mean. Can you
elaborate and maybe give an example?

[1] I have yet to see someone step up and take over one of the more
exotic packages after it was essentially orphaned.

	Thomas