On Tuesday, June 13, 2023 at 1:40:42 PM UTC-7 Tobias Diez wrote: But I think it would be better to reuse tools (or at least their ideas) that were developed exactly to manage and restrict dependencies between different layers/modules of an application, such as https://github.com/zyskarch/pytestarch, https://github.com/seddonym/import-linter, https://github.com/jwbargsten/pytest-archon, https://github.com/TNG/ArchUnit. All of them define external rules about admissible relationships.
Of course there are tools like this. But I decided to go for a more explicit approach, reusing a mechanism (# optional) that is already familiar to Sage developers. For example, the question "why did this doctest not run" is trivial to answer with the explicit annotations; whereas when using stacktrace inspection tools, all answers will be technical. And as I explained elsewhere, the # optional annotations also improve the documentation for the benefit of the project. - Some of the # optional annotations such as "# optional - sage.libs.singular" give specific attribution to the various libraries that we use for the actual computations. This has the potential of improving our project's relation to upstream developers, counteracting the impression that Sage tries to take credit for functionality provided by the upstream project. (I will not elaborate on this with examples.) - Some # optional annotations reduce the barrier for contributors, by clearly signaling to developers "it's OK and definitely not your fault if you don't understand this doctest". Finally, the explicit annotations also enable an incremental development/documentation process regarding library dependencies -- not just within the modularization project but also very useful when preparing to replace the use of one library for a feature with another library. The interaction of various libraries is sometimes very complex in Sage, and developers can add "# optional" annotations while navigating this maze of dependencies. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/f3865714-a407-4855-bd82-832c0b4dc424n%40googlegroups.com.
