Hi Everyone,

I have been silent for a while, although I do follow the developments. The reason I am writing is the function packages.

About a month ago, I have been checking out a specific function package (the name and its author is not important), and I saw that it was quite buggy. Moreover, it was faulty method-wise as well !!! I decided to contact the developer and explained the issues. The problems were acknowledged, (some of them were already known) although there were no promises to fix them soon. I has been a month and the errors are still there.

As you may know, the reliability of scientific software is a serious matter, at least to some people and there is a whole literature devoted to this. My recent experience shows that there is definitely room for improvement here for gretl. A few things that immediately come to mind  are:

1)- It would be useful for the main program to put some sort of disclaimer about the packages; warning the user that these are not official, some of them are seldomly updated (if at all), likely to be full of bugs and errors etc.

2)- Setting up some sort of peer review process where packages are checked and verified by a developer.

3)- A means to comment or rate packages can also be useful.

4)- Adding usage statistics maybe. These data can be censored by presenting as rankings etc. This would also encourage writing better packages.

I know gretl has not many packages but still the emphasis should be placed on quality, not quantity. It took more than two decades for gretl to build its current reputation of high quality software. (I know what Allin went through in the beginnings.) However, it is possible to lose this reputation fairly quickly with a few bad extension packages.

Just my two cents.

A. Talha YALTA