Tuesday, November 10 at 18:00 UTC. That is 10:00 Pacific / 13:00 Eastern in the US, 19:00 in Central Europe and 3:00 in Japan (Wednesday).
Octave Forge a blessing or a blocker? — Octave Forge started as a project to cope with slow Octave core development and was successful with it for many years. Today the situation seems inverted.
The last big push came in 2017 with an amazing new website and hard repository migration work done by many volunteer developers. Many of them are no longer active and necessary maintenance work does not happen. For example, there are 330 open bug reports only for Octave Forge packages. More than half of the packages are “abandoned” for more than a year.
str = urlread ("https://gnu-octave.github.io/pkg-index/");
t = regexp (str, '<td>(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})</td>', "tokens");
t = cellfun (@datenum, t);
number_of_packages = length (t) # 77
one_year__or_older = sum (t < datenum (2020, 01, 01)) # 49
two_years_or_older = sum (t < datenum (2019, 01, 01)) # 31
hist (t, 80)
xt = datenum (2008:2022, 01, 01);
set (gca (), "xtick", xt);
datetick (gca (), "x", "yyyy", "keepticks");
Other programming languages like Python live from a huge community of package contributors. Octave has an easy to use package system, but not many well-maintained packages. Why?
I would like to setup an Online Developer Meeting to discuss how to improve the situation and make it more attractive to create Octave packages.
- Who enforces the “high-quality” of Octave Forge packages?
- How to deal with the package legacy code?
- Merge the lightweight approach pkg-index with Octave Forge?
Start discussing here