Moving octave2.9 from experimental to sid would be a nice project for
someone with lots of free time in her hands. There are two things that
need to be done in this respect:
1) Make the octave2.1 and octave2.9 packages exist peacefully. For now,
it is impossible to install the *-doc, *-emacsen, *-headers, *-html,
and *-info package together.
2) All the packages depending on octave2.1 today have api-v15
compatibility level. Since octave2.9 is api-v16, we need two
different binary versions each package. We could have
octave-forge-v13 (Depends: octave2.1) and octave-forge-v16 (Depends:
octave2.9), for instance. The files which are common to both 2.1 and
2.9 (like the *.m scripts) would go into a octave-forge-common
package, say.
The enormous advantage of this move is that octave2.9 will reach the
masses without breaking octave2.1.
Unfortunately, I do not have time to undertake this task in the
foreseeable future. Volunteers?