As the maintainer of the NaN-package, I want to reply to these two comments;

comment #1:

> I think that is the expected behavior of the NaN package. The intent is to provide replacements of core functions that have different behavior under the presence of NaN values.

and

https://octave.discourse.group/t/so-many-warnings-upon-loading-nan-package/400

> For some reason the package maintainer did not choose to fix a reported bug about this issue. (this comment links to this bug #57814)

Here is my response to these two comments:

It is correct, that the intend of the NaN-toolbox is to modify the behaviour of serveral statistical functions w.r.t. how NaNs are handled in these functions. When the NaN-toolbox initially developed, installing these functions did not cause warnings in Octave. Only at some later time, Octave started to issue warnings. So these kind of warnings were caused by the maintainers of Octave. And I must assume that this was done intentionally.
 
IMO, the preferred solution would be that all statistical functions handle NaN's gracefully, and just ignore NaNs. But I've received clear response that such patches would not be accepted for the sake of "compatibility" to Matlab. I'd say doing the "right thing" (i.e. skipping NaNs) trumps the argument of some braindead "compatibility to Matlab". But the maintainers of Octave do not agree. I guess that's the main dispute here. Other issues that were mentioned  are:
- coding style (that these should be easily solvable)
- performance (this issue is mostly mute, because we are usually memory-bandwith limited, not cpu-limited - in most cases there is no performance penalty.
- the corner case of mean - which might be also used in a non-statistical context (when propagating NaNs is the right thing to do, e.g. computing the center of a triangle). I'm not aware that any other statistical function could be used in a meaningful way in a non-statistical context. And I'm sure we can also find some solution for mean.

What remains is the question whether "gracefully handling NaNs" or some braindead "compatibility" issue is more important. I and the users of the NaN-toolbox have already made up their mind on this - despite these scary warnings. 

Addressing the issue of these (false) warnings can not be done from within the NaN-toolbox alone, but there need to be an agreement on a wider basis. Only then this issue is "solvable".

Sorry, the rest of my post got lost due to an unclosed "verbatim" tag.

What I mean is, yeah, I agree that this is intended behavior. And since it's working as intended, perhaps the warnings should be suppressed? They don't indicate anything going wrong, and no user action is required, so IMHO they shouldn't be displayed to the user.

This is what I see:

octave:2> pkg load nan
warning: function /Users/janke/octave/nan-3.4.5/mad.m shadows a core library function
warning: called from
    load_packages_and_dependencies at line 48 column 5
    load_packages at line 47 column 3
    pkg at line 461 column 7
warning: function /Users/janke/octave/nan-3.4.5/prctile.m shadows a core library function
warning: called from
    load_packages_and_dependencies at line 48 column 5
    load_packages at line 47 column 3
    pkg at line 461 column 7

and when I see something like that, I assume something's going wrong that I need to address.

Maybe a little magic in PKG_ADD could be used to temporarily disable the "shadows core function" warning while the nan package is adding its stuff to the path?

When I load the nan Octave Forge package, I get several warnings about it shadowing core library functions.

octave:4> pkg load nan
warning: function /Users/janke/octave/nan-3.4.5/mad.m shadows a core library function
warning: called from
    load_packages_and_dependencies at line 48 column 5
    load_packages at line 47 column 3
    pkg at line 461 column 7
warning: function /Users/janke/octave/nan-3.4.5/prctile.m shadows a core library function
warning: called from
    load_packages_and_dependencies at line 48 column 5
    load_packages at line 47 column 3
    pkg at line 461 column 7
warning: function /Users/janke/octave/nan-3.4.5/ranks.m shadows a core library function
warning: called from
    load_packages_and_dependencies at line 48 column 5
    load_packages at line 47 column 3
    pkg at line 461 column 7
+verbatim+

Since these are expected and intentional, could the warnings be suppressed, maybe with a little magic in PKG_ADD in the package?