On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 8:44 AM, mabshoff <mabsh...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Jan 25, 8:20 am, Martin Albrecht <m...@informatik.uni-bremen.de>
> wrote:
>> > 4.0 was discussed
>>
>> I think we should agree way in advance when 4.0 is going to be
>
> +1
>
>> and then allow
>> ourselves to break backwards compatibility: i.e. go through and remove a
>> bunch of cruft (at least the stuff that has a DeprecationWarning).
> I don't think it is a good idea at all. Deprecation warnings are the
> way to go and I think even six months is too little time to give the
I also think the above suggestion about 4.0 by Martin is not so good.
We already hashed out a deprecation policy, which is a gradual timed (usually
6-month) phasing out of functionality with DeprecationsWarning's. I think it
works well, and that we should stick to it.
For a long time (since 3.0) the main goals of 4.0 have been:
* massive improvement in doctest coverage
* Solaris port
* 64-bit OS X port
* Windows port
At this point the windows port ended up getting little direct work
done on it, so that is off the table for 4.0. Everything else above
is. To make it more precise, here's what 4.0 should be:
* get doctest coverage to 70%
* tier 1 support for 32-bit Solaris
* tier 1 support for 64-bit OS X
I would like to see this all happen by the end of the first quarter 2009.
William
> vast silent Sage user base a chance to upgrade. More and more of the
> user base does not show up on the list or makes its problems known to
> us. The AMS meeting has shown that people are also upgrading much more
> slowly than the developers for obvious reasons. Having the deprecated
> functionality in tree has a very tiny cost to support IMHO and
> breaking people's code should be avoided at all costs. Every time an
> Open Source CAS has broken backward compatibility in major way (GAP 3
> vs. 4, M vs. M2 - I know that you aren't proposing anything as drastic
> like that) a large portion of the user base and more importantly a lot
> of code written in the older version was never ported forward. CoCoA 4
> has code that you could run Macaulay code and given the less than
> stellar speed of CoCoA's interpreter it was a surprise to me that this
> feature was in demand. When I worked for the CoCoA team we had
> requests to support *8 year* old versions of CoCoA when it was trivial
> to get a new version.
>
> We should not go into the same direction as say Maple where a new
> major version often promises to break code (even though this is more
> embellished than in reality).
>
>> Cheers,
>> Martin
>
> Cheers,
>
> Michael
>
>> --
>> name: Martin Albrecht
>> _pgp:http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99
>> _otr: 47F43D1A 5D68C36F 468BAEBA 640E8856 D7951CCF
>> _www:http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb
>> _jab: martinralbre...@jabber.ccc.de
> >
>
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
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