Promote octave-devel to octave?

[Joshua Root]

On 2013-5-25 16:08 , Blair Zajac wrote:
> On 5/24/13 5:12 AM, Michael Dickens wrote:
>> On Fri, May 24, 2013, at 03:42 AM, Aljaž Srebrnič wrote:
>>> Well, I can test them with octave-devel if you want!
>>
>> Give it a go!
>>
>> I picked 5 random octave-* ports (irsa, specfun, strings, ?don't
>> remember?) and tried to install them (10.8.3 all latest); 4 installed.
>> Of those 4, I've figured out how to use 2 of them (they "just work").
>> The other 2 do not seem to work for me -- but, I've never used add-ons
>> to octave so I'm having to learn how to do that.  From what I read
>> online, and looking at the Octave PortGroup, each of these port's addons
>> should be registered with octave when the port is activated (and,
>> unregistered when deactivated) -- or, that's my guess. So, they truly
>> should "just work" when active.  I don't know why 2 do not seem to work;
>> I don't know enough about the octave addon activation process yet.
>>
>> So, from this small random sampling my vote is to not move octave-devel
>> to octave just yet, but first for someone to go through and make sure
>> all of the current octave-* ports install and work correctly with
>> octave-devel.  I will have some time to do this in a few weeks, maybe.
>> Maybe somebody else has time sooner? - MLD
> 
> I was asking since octave is pretty old compared to octave-devel and
> needed octave for a bit, but I don't have the cycles to do this myself.
> 
> It does seem that if the addons don't work with octave-devel they should
> be deprecated.  We could copy octave to octave32 and rename any octave-*
> that only with with 3.2.x.

I think at least some of the addon ports are in the situation of not
being updated to the latest version because it's no longer compatible
with octave 3.2. The converse may also be true in some cases, with the
older version being incompatible with octave 3.6.

- Josh