On Thu, 5 Nov 2015 15:41:57 -0700, Phil Steitz wrote:
On 11/5/15 1:58 PM, Luc Maisonobe wrote:
Le 05/11/2015 12:25, Gilles a écrit :
Hello.

On Wed, 04 Nov 2015 10:13:00 +0100, luc wrote:
Hi all,

I would like to release 3.6 in the upcoming weeks.
There have been a bunch of bug fixes and a few evolutions that are
important to me.
s/3.6/4.0/

And the statement is still true.

[...]

Of course, once 3.6 is out the MATH_3_X branch will remain alive and
we could also release other versions later on in the 3.x series.
Should we worry that the next major release will be endlessly delayed?
I think we are really quite far from releasing 4.0 as in many packages we did not even start refactoring API. Optimization is clearly the most well known example, but there are also other things waiting in the pipe
for geometry and ode.

Is there any specific target for 4.0?
Could we judge how far we are from releasing a major release with the
same arguments which you used for 3.6 (many additions, bug fixes,
things someone would like to use, etc.)?

4.0 does not need to be perfect. [3.0 was supposed to be perfect ;-).]
4.1 will be!  Or 4.2, or 5.0...

Let's not forget that we agreed to work towards 4.0, and that the 3.x
branch was an afterthought.

Since we now effectively maintain two versions of CM, it makes sense
to allow people to benefit from the extra work.

My viewpoint is that we can have releases from both branches, making
it clear what is old/deprecated/broken in 3.x and what is still
missing in 4.y.

I agree on this.  One thing I forgot to mention above is I think we
may have a few places in 3.x optimization where every way to do
something is deprecated.  I suggest we take a careful look and
undeprecate where necessary to make 3.6 usable without warnings.  I
may be wrong since I don't use that code myself; but I think its
worth taking a careful look and considering removal of some
deprecations.

I'm against this.  And is why I started the sure-to-be-controversial
discussion on 4.0.

We agreed that things were (relatively) broken, and we agreed on a
way forward (fluent API, refactoring of the "optim" classes); yet
things don't move, because there is no urge to fix them since new
features can be back-ported indefinitely to the 3.x series.

Undeprecating what we agreed should be deprecated would only
reinforce that feeling, and certainly won't attract attention that
we need help to make progress.
[And, in addition, 3.x is tied to old Java5 (known tune)...]

In summary, I think that new features should only go to the master
branch, while only bug-fixes would be back-ported to MATH_3_X.
Thus everybody can have the best of both, while reducing the
amount of work for the developers.  Continuing in this way, and
we'll soon have to also "forward-port" bugs reported against the
3.x series. :-/


Gilles


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