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.

Octave Forge - Facts and figures

• https://octave.sourceforge.io/packages.php
  • 50 community packages
  • 21 external packages
  • several unmaintained / renamed packages

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

The package legacy in 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?

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)