Hi folks, Before conspiracy theories on the subject get fully developed, let me give an overview of things that transpired at Sage Days 14 and the plan of dealing with them.
1. in preparation for my talk, I spent a significant amount of quality time with the schemes/ directory, attempting to categorise the various types of algebraic-geometric objects that Sage knows about, and exactly how much Sage can do with them; in addition to this, various participants played around with Sage and ran into bugs/questionable behaviour/not implemented basic features. The conclusion of all this is that while some objects have extensive and well-tested functionality (e.g. elliptic curves, and to a lesser extent hyperelliptic curves), the code in schemes/ needs some love. Doctest coverage needs to be brought up to 100%. Easy yet not implemented features need to be put in. Bugs need to be fixed. This is a prerequisite to part 2 below, and to attracting algebraic geometers to use Sage for their research and teaching. 2. in the discussion sessions, as well as informal conversations, a plethora of requests for enhancement has emerged. This is listed in a rather summary fashion at http://wiki.sagemath.org/AlgebraicGeometrySEP A couple of topics are expanded upon with sample syntax, etc. The natural question is: what are we going to do about these points? I will personally start by focusing on 1; this is what Justin meant by "cleaning up the old code". I see this as a gradual process, and for my part I will strive to make it as non-disruptive to others as possible: my emphasis will be on documentation and examples, on fixing broken behaviour, and only if absolutely necessary on modifying current working behaviour. I will try to work on one aspect at a time so that few files are touched by any single patch. Also, whatever I work on will be clearly indicated on trac so that if others want to join in the fun we don't end up duplicating our efforts. Of course design questions should and will be discussed publicly. I'm not convinced sage-nt is the correct venue for this, and I'm also not convinced there should be a sage-ag. I'll probably just post to sage-devel and cc to sage-nt in those cases where the questions are of interest to number theorists (e.g. elliptic or hyperelliptic curves). I'll be happy to have some company in this endeavour, whether it is in the form of direct work on points 1 and 2, or suggestions, or refereeing of patches, or more testing and bug reports, or precisely formulated enhancement requests. Best, Alex -- Alex Ghitza -- Lecturer in Mathematics -- The University of Melbourne -- Australia -- http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~aghitza/<http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/%7Eaghitza/> --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
