Re: Merging Octave and Octave-Forge?

[soren]

Quoting Thomas Weber <address@hidden>:
> Am Dienstag, den 26.08.2008, 09:01 +0200 schrieb address@hidden:
> > The problem with a wiki is that we have lots of auto-generated
> > contents such as the function reference, the doxygen stuff, the manual
> > (on octave.org), and similar. I'm not sure how well that would fit
> > into a wiki.
>
> Simply let that stuff outside of the wiki and link to it. If it's
> autogenerated, there's no need for people to touch it.

Sure, we can do that, but then I don't get the point of having a wiki.

My main points with the web site is simply:
  * I think it's confusing that we have two web sites.
  * It's more work to maintain two web sites than one.

If the two web sites were merged by creating a wiki, then fine by me.  
I'm just advocating a merge, not a specific technical solution  
(although it is highly relevant to figure the technical stuff out).

> > >>    * The Windows binary at Octave-Forge currently is the de-facto way
> > >> of getting
> > >>      Octave on Windows. I really think this binary is a great  
> > feature, and I
> > >>      honestly think it should be hosted at octave.org, and be  
> > blessed as the
> > >>      semi-official way of getting Octave on Windows. I don't
> > >> know/understand the
> > >>      Mac situation, as it seems many people are also using Fink.
> > >
> > > How is octave.org's bandwidth? SF, as bad/slow as it may be, has several
> > > mirrors available.
> >
> > I think we have access to the GNU mirrors.
>
> Oh, I see that GNU hosts windows binaries. I didn't know that.

Okay, good point :-)  But we could easily host the binaries on  
sourceforge and link directly to them from octave.org, couldn't we?

> How do you update the documentation? I don't think you write it by hand,
> do you? It's probably part of the Makefile.

Well, you update the documentation by changing the texinfo help text  
in the specific function (either m-file or cc-file). Then we run a  
script that extracts all the help texts and generates a whole bunch of  
html pages. Fairly simple, but also quite time-consuming (it takes  
about half an hour on my machine to generate the function reference).

> It shouldn't be a problem to trigger an update when a new package is
> uploaded.

In principle no, but it requires some server-side functionality, that  
might be hard to get (you need a fairly large build setup to create  
the web pages).

Søren