Hi All, I'll start out by summarizing the current situation: the Octave-Forge release system sucks! So, why does it suck? Let's look at the current release procedure. When $my_package has been changed, the maintainer needs to wait until the release manager (that would be me) decides to make a new release. At that point the release manager runs a set of scripts that creates all packages, and compares them with the ones that are currently uploaded. Any packages that has been changed since the last release are then flaged as being changed. These packages are then uploaded manually to Sourceforge. All packages are then used to generate the web pages, which are then uploaded manually to Sourceforge. So, what's the problem with this approach?
1) Package maintainers are not in control of when their package is released. This is also a problem when new packages are added to the list. They are only available to users after the next release. 2) The system has some bugs that incorrectly flags some packages as being changed, even though they haven't been changed. This creates more work for the release manager, but also for distributions that has to update their packages. 3) The current code for generating the web pages is quite a mess. At this point, it is practically impossible to make changes to anything related to the web pages. 4) If some problem occurs during the package creation, the release manager has to fix the issue. Since the release manager doesn't really know the code as well as its maintainer, he really isn't the right person to fix the issue. I'm probably forgetting some issues here, so feel free to remind me of other issues :-) So, what can we do to improve the situation? In the long term I think we should have our web site integrated with www.octave.org, as this will make things easier for users, and will be less work for us. However, doing this is a large task, and I'm not sure what such a move requires. So, for now I think we should try to improve the situation within the limitations of the setup that Sourceforge provides. The main limitation of Sourceforge is that some privileged user has to manually upload the packages. What I suggest is that package maintainers makes the releases. The only thing they wont be able to do is to upload the packages and web pages to Sourceforge. That is, when a maintainer decides to make a release he/she creates the package file, and the relevant web pages. These files should then be made available to a privileged user who then uploads them to Sourceforge. This is still a bit tedious and could be automated, but I don't think it can be improved within the limitations of Sourceforge. So, any thoughts on the situation? I'm open to alternative solutions, but I think we, in the short term, need to limit ourselves to what Sourceforge can do. Søren ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Octave-dev mailing list Octave-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/octave-dev
