Since the minor Octave 5.2 release this January, I experienced that building and especially releasing Octave is still a difficult task. Even worse, due to some nasty bugs and the lack of a voluntary, skilled, and motivated release manager, the next major Octave 6.1 release got stuck for eight months now.

Today, I read an interesting article about Hilbert Matrices in N. Higham’s blog and stumbled over these simple elegant two lines:

On June 4th there arrived an extraordinary mail by Hossein on the Octave maintainers mailing-list. To my knowledge he has not been involved into Octave development so far. He introduced shortly and convincingly OctaveCoder:

Many popular source code hosting services do not support Mercurial (in short “hg”). After Bitbucket announced the “sunsetting” of Mercurial repositories in April 2020, only good old SourceForge and GNU Savannah still support hg.

My slides and the white-paper of the “Workshop on Large-scale Parallel Numerical Computing Technology” (LSPANC 2020) at RIKEN.