Online Developer Meeting (2020-11-10)

• Date: Tuesday, November 11, 2020 @ 18:00 UTC
• Location: https://meet.jit.si/octave-dev-2020-11-10

Todays topics

• Meet and greet 5 minutes before meeting (audio testing).

The future of Octave Packages

See also Discourse.

Key points to discuss (Kai)

Octave Forge packages ⊂ Octave packages

• Creating, maintaining, installing Octave packages must become more simple/fun.
• Octave Forge needs more automation (#pkg-index) or manpower.
• Guide new package contributors (remove old, stale, irritating complex documentation).

The Octave Forge legacy

Facts and figures

• https://octave.sourceforge.io/packages.php
  • 50 community packages
  • 21 external packages
  • several unmaintained / renamed packages
  • 25 new package releases (40 in total) for 2020.
  • about 5 do not work with Octave 5.2 and about 12 will not work in Octave 6.1 (see link)

• https://sourceforge.net/p/octave/_members/
  • 7 admins (only Olaf, Mike and Kai "active")
  • 51 developer (maybe 10 recently)

• 5 request for new packages in the last two years (2 approved).
  • Octave Forge is not attractive, why?

https://octave.sourceforge.io/

• Website looks great.
• No major updates (necessary) since 2018 http://hg.code.sf.net/p/octave/project-web
• Useful Function List. How to update this #53860? Maybe "generate_html" package.
• Original developer (Oliver) no longer active.
• Adding and updating packages here is expensive/dangerous
  • manual SFTP uploads
  • no version control for the individual package documentation
  • approx. 5-10 minutes per package release.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/octave/

• FLOSS software based on Apache Allura
• One of the last hosting services offering Mercurial (hg) support
• Slow and many commercials, buggy UI.

Clumsy package development / releasing

• The procedure is documented in the wiki: Reviewing Octave Forge packages
  • Experience of Kai after a few releases:
    • An "easy release" with basic installation/functionality checking/uploading takes me about 20-30 minutes.
    • If something is wrong with the tarballs another 20-30 minutes.
    • Version numbers are tracked in too many locations (DESCRIPTION, configure.ac, ...)
    • Octave Forge claims "high quality"
      • No OF admin can enforce it within 20-30 minutes (e.g. lack of package domain knowledge).
      • Users find many bugs despite this "high quality" release check procedures.
      • Why not just automatically release packages (pkg-index)?

• Octave Forge suggests extensions to the official Octave package format
  • Maintainers Makefile
    • Release tarballs must be manually created and uploaded.
    • Avoids automatic tarball creation (see pkg-example). Better practice?
  • The OF example-package is rather complicated, avoid advertising it any longer?

Savannah

When reporting an Octave (core) bug on https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=octave you are "greeted" with 1523 open bug reports of which 330 reports (22%) belong to Octave Forge packages and 240 (15%) are older than a year.

• They are not likely to be closed or worked on and leave a maintenance burden and bad impression (user requests for unmaintained packages are ignored there) back to Octave (core).

Ideas:

• Ignore and collect requests to infinity?
• Close bugs of inactive packages older than X years? (Drop the illusion, that someone ever will fix it.)
• Octave Forge suggests to use the Savannah Bug tracker for bug reports. Drop this announcement?
• Reopen the old Octave Forge bug tracker? (see below)

MXE-Octave

• The MS Windows installer bundles 47 Octave packages.
• Are there criteria for including packages in the Windows installer? No.
• Forced updates to the packages? No.
• Make criterion to drop package from installer if it no longer compiles "normally" (document somewhere)? Depends on decision of mxe-octave.
• Document how to request package inclusion in the MS Windows installer (open bug report, Discourse, manual)? wiki
• About 26 patches necessary to achieve this.

of-communications-1-catop.patch
of-fits-1-cross-fixes.patch
of-fits-2-fixes.patch
of-fl-core-1-fixes.patch
of-gsl-1-cross-fixes.patch
of-interval-1-cross-fixes.patch
of-ltfat-1-cross-fixes.patch
of-nurbs-1-fixes.patch
of-nurbs-2-dev-fixes.patch
of-ocs-1-cross-fixes.patch
of-ocs-2-dev-fixes.patch
of-ocs-3-break-fixes.patch
of-ocs-4-pkgadd-fixes.patch
of-ocs-5-no-odepkg.patch
of-odepkg-1-fixes.patch
of-odepkg-2-fixes.patch
of-odepkg-3-deprecated.patch
of-quaternion-1-cross-fixes.patch
of-quaternion-2-dev-fixes.patch
of-sockets-1-cross-fixes.patch
of-sockets-2-deprecated.patch
of-specfun-1-deprecated.patch
of-statistics-1-cross.patch
of-strings-1-fixes.patch
of-tisean-1-fixes.patch
of-video-1-fixes.patch

New directions

pkg-index

• https://gnu-octave.github.io/pkg-index/
• https://github.com/gnu-octave/pkg-index/

• Super set of Octave Forge (all packages in latest version included)
• Easy to add, update and delete entries (just one file of meta data)
• Advertise pkg-index as (only) major platform for Octave packages? Not exclusive, but stronger highlight approach.

• Future development:
  • Automated quality checks (dead URLs, pkg installation problems)

pkg tool

• Current pkg very interleaved with / limited by Octave Forge -forge
  • Abstracting package registry / index?
• Alternatives exist octave-packajoozle (pkj)

• General design: Making pkg an Octave package? (see below)
  • Changes to pkg or the package format can be applied to old Octave versions.
  • Multiple pkg tools can be developed.

Octave package format

• Documented in the Octave manual
• In general good Octave programming project organization.
• Permitting "DESCRIPTION.md" or "DESCRIPTION.txt" extensions? (Nice highlighting in many modern source code hosting platforms.) Not decided.

General questions, open talk

• How to teach people that creating an Octave package is as simple as pkg-example?
• Packages must become smaller?
  • Split large packages into different functionalities?
• Octave Forge package maintenance overtaking (inactive packages)?
  • Authorship can never be "overtaken".
  • Grace period after public email on the mailing-list?
  • Forbidden at all, only package forking?
• Where to host package documentation?
  • doc folder, wiki, in the repo itself (pkg-example README.md)?

Some outcomes of the meeting

• The responsibility for a package is with the maintainer, not Octave (core).
  • Okay to continue the use of Savannah for current Octave Forge packages, but not for pkg-index.

• pkg-index
  • How to treat malicious code/packages? User reports, package removal. Depending on the actual case.

• pkg tool as package
  • If synchronized with Octave core, no usage of "if version ... else ..." code
  • Watch out for problems with encodings (treated differently in older Octave versions)
  • Treatment of pkg install -forge if package moved away from Octave Forge

• documentation
  • mxe-octave: necessary steps to include a package
    • only necessary if depending on external library, otherwise should install properly

Ideas for next meeting

Topic suggestions

Octave 7

• Not only providing major releases that "fix Matlab incompatibilities".
• Great new features for a great new release.
• Code sprints.

See also

• Next meeting: TBA
• Last meeting: Online Developer Meeting (2020-10-27)