Dear All,

The sci herd would like to propose the addition of a new
octave-forge.eclass as well as a new portage category 
dev-octave to house new octave-forge ebuilds.

Background:
-----------

GNU octave [1] is a high level language and computing environment aimed 
at numerical computations. octave-forge [2] provides a collection of 
extensions for, e.g., image processing, bioinformatics, etc., to the octave 
core package. In the past, the octave-forge package extending the octave-2* 
core was a monolithic build and is currently available in portage as 
sci-mathematics/octave-forge. For the newly released octave-3* core, 
octave-forge has been split into a large number of individual packages, 
each implementing a distinct functionality. In addition, the breath of the 
new octave-forge packages has been greatly expanded. Currently, there are 
more than 40 octave-forge-packages and the number is growing.


Current State of Affairs:
-------------------------

We have developed an octave-forge.eclass that handles the installation
of individual octave-forge packages as well as the management of the 
octave core-owned package database.
Both the octave-forge.eclass [3] as well as the individual
octave-forge ebuilds [4] are currently maintained in the scientific overlay
and have been tested over the past couple of months.


Proposal:
---------

We would like to propose two things:

  1) Addition of the octave-forge.eclass [3] to the main portage tree.

     The octave-forge.eclass in its current state provides a wrapper
     around the package install functionality of the octave core.
     It uses octave core's "pkg" command for compilation and
     installation inside the sandbox and adds functionality 
     to maintain the octave core database file of installed octave-forge 
     packages. It is available for review at [3] (due to its length I didn't
     want to attach it to the post).

  2) Addition of the individual octave-forge packages into a new
     category, dev-octave

     In principle, the octave-forge packages could be added to sci-mathematics.
     However, since we are already at > 40 packages with more to come in
     the future it seems that creating a completely new category dev-octave
     would both be more appropriate and make things more manageable in the
     future.


Any feedback regarding our proposal and improvements to the octave-forge.eclass
would be very welcome.

Thanks all for your time and reading through this long post.

Best regards,
Markus



[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
[2] http://octave.sourceforge.net/
[3] http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/science/browser/overlay/eclass/octave-forge.eclass
[4] http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/science/browser/overlay/sci-mathematics 

-- 
Markus Dittrich (markusle)
Gentoo Linux Developer
Scientific applications
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