inconsistent condition numbers from cond, det, inv functions

[John W. Eaton]

On  7-Feb-2008, David Bateman wrote:

| Unfortunately, for reasons I don't quite understand, Octave has many
| files with copyright assigned to individual authors

I agree with all that you've posted, but I should probably explain
this point.

Up until about 1996, I asked people who contributed non-trivial
changes to either disclaim copyright or assign copyright to me, same
as the FSF requires for projects for which the FSF holds the
copyright.  The only difference being that I was the sole copyright
holder instead of the FSF.  Then I stopped doing it, primarily because
it is a slow process, especially given that Octave contributors are
widely distributed geographically, and also because I noticed that
other projects (notably the Linux kernel) were not asking for signed
disclaimers/assignments either, and they were getting along just
fine without the extra paperwork.

Once I stopped asking for disclaimers/assignments, I couldn't very
claim copyright on files I didn't write, so I decided to leave the
primary author as the copyright holder for new files.

If someone makes major changes to a file, then I think it is
reasonable to add them as a copyright holder for the file, and there
are a number of files in Octave that have multiple names listed in the
copyright lines.  If we missed some, it is not intentional.  But at
the same time, a few lines changed doesn't seem like a sufficient
reason to change the copyright notice.  Credit is certainly given in
the ChangeLog files.

jwe