On Thu, Oct 2, 2025 at 12:15 PM John H Palmieri <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Tuesday, September 30, 2025 at 4:29:28 AM UTC-7 [email protected] > wrote: > > Hey there, > > I am very grateful that people put their time into working on the build > system, packaging, and these little developer annoyances. After some > initial hiccups, it's been a joy to work with meson, not having the docs > build all the time is imho the right thing to do, and installing with conda > has proved much easier (and at the very least it fails much faster, at > least when I am doing the hand-holding.) That's my personal experience and > I understand that for others such changes might have been much more > annoying. > > Personally, I was not too surprised by any of these changes. Maybe because > I happened to stumble upon the relevant PRs on GitHub before things were > merged. But apparently that didn't work for many other people. I think it's > a good idea to announce anything that is likely going to affect developers > before it's merged. I don't think this means that everything that affects > developers needs a vote but announcing things is a friendly gesture and if > people then have doubts that this is the right way forward, we can still > call for a vote. > > On Monday, September 29, 2025 at 11:34:44 PM UTC+3 Nils Bruin wrote: > > Autocratic rule by just forcing decisions through does not invite buy-in > and ultimately will narrow the community; not grow it. > > > I think a friendlier aspect would be to call this do-ocracy but of course > I understand what you mean. Ultimately, many open source projects work to > some extent like that. The project (by whatever governance) might decide on > a direction but if nobody is willing to implement things, then such a > decision doesn't really matter. Instead, when somebody is willing to > improve things, I think the general attitude should be a supportive one. Of > course people should invite buy-in and listen to criticism (and in our > system this might ultimately lead to disputed PRs or a vote on sage-devel.) > > On Monday, September 29, 2025 at 7:12:49 PM UTC+3 John H Palmieri wrote: > > If someone is working on the build system and neither the author nor the > reviewer think to try it out on a fresh git clone, I think it's also fair > to call that careless. > > Others may disagree with me. > > > Yes, I think I do disagree :) I would have expected the automated testing > (buildbot) to catch such an issue somehow. I personally think it's too much > to ask from a reviewer to try something like this. After all, what would > have been thorough? Whether it builds from a git clone & from a tarball & > from a previous build on Linux & macOS…then I'd rather not review to be > honest. I don't have the changeset in front of me but I think it's a call > for the author to make which scenarios to check (and I am sure the author > checked some scenarios that they saw most likely affected.) When you make > changes on the foundations, stuff breaks, people are sorry, and we move on. > That's unfortunate but that's life. I think that's one of the main reasons > for CI, i.e., to detect unexpected breakage. > > > I think that building from a fresh git clone is not an unreasonable thing > to expect a careful reviewer and author to do. It's certainly something I > do if I'm testing a change that affects the build system. This is > especially the case for the particular situation here: the PR deleted a > filed called, I don't know, blah.py.in or something. If you are doing an > incremental build, the file blah.py will likely already be present from a > previous build, so maybe the only way to see an impact of this change is to > build from a fresh clone. (Does "make distclean" remove all of these > autogenerated files? I don't think so, but I'm not sure.) I would also say > that a careful reviewer will absolutely use the automated testing > framework, but they will also know that this framework has its limitations. > Even on a fast machine with most packages pre-installed system-wide (running e.g. Gentoo Linux), cleaning the repo, configuring with `--enable-system-site-packages`, and build+tests+docbuild still takes ~1.5 hours (longer if you do long tests, have lots of optional packages, etc). Another hour if `--enable-system-site-packages` is not used. Another hour or 2 if you updated something that a lot is relying on, e.g. flint, and have to build many big packages, like Singular. So, assuming you don't review more than 1 PR in parallel, it can easily take 2-3 hours on average. OK, I often review seemingly unrelated PRs in parallel. And yes, I often don't test in such a throughout way something that, seemingly, is not potentially breaking things (but then, well, indeed, a silly typo can break things far down, in a test, or in docbuild). Docbuild is a major drag, it needs to get dependency tracking to avoid rebuilding the whole thing. By the way, to give you an example of careless, in my book, reviewing: #40877. (it wasn't actually even reviewed, the release manager just pushed it through, over our protests). It reverted #40765, which in particular made sure that there is a way to find Sage's cython directories, via sage.config. Now for instance sage_numerical_backends_* (coin, etc) cannot be built because the old way to find cython directories is gone, and the new way got reverted. So now, there is a request to revive sage_numerical_backends_coin, and one has to dig through the branch of #40765 to fish out the necessary bits. Dima > > > julian > > -- > 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 [email protected]. > To view this discussion visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/58dee9b6-ec90-4e4a-ae7c-0d4f055e0777n%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/58dee9b6-ec90-4e4a-ae7c-0d4f055e0777n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/CAAWYfq38YwRbHNTo%3DBPC42reV99vUek7mjSSZHN-q92XzJ_u%2Bw%40mail.gmail.com.
