On Apr 23, 12:57 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 12:32 PM, David Roe <r...@math.harvard.edu> wrote:
Hi,
> > +1 from me as a good goal for 4.0. But I don't have a whole lot of
> > experience with dealing with spkgs, and I'll be working on improving
> > p-adics, so I probably won't be helping much.
> > David
>
> > 2009/4/23 Tim Abbott <tabb...@mit.edu>
>
> >> I'd like to add as a goal that Sage 4.0 works with versions of its
> >> dependencies available from the relevant upstreams.
>
> >> For context, I would very much like to be able to package Sage 4.0 for
> >> Debian once it comes out, since I find the current state of having Sage
> >> 3.0.5 from last July to be somewhat embarrassing. However, updating Sage
> >> in Debian is really difficult because most Sage releases use a version of
> >> at least one of its dependencies that could not reasonably be packaged for
> >> use both in Sage and outside of Sage. This has been a problem both for my
> >> efforts and for the people working on making Sage available in Fedora.
>
> >> I like that Sage has a development model where fixing a bug in Sage
> >> resulting from a dependency does not require waiting for an upstream
> >> release, since this helps keep progress moving quickly. However, I would
> >> find it incredibly helpful if every 3 or 6 months Sage did a release that
> >> worked with upstream releases of its dependencies. Those releases would
> >> then be packaged by distributions. This model is very similar to how a
> >> lot of projects do unstable development for N months before doing a stable
> >> release that can be shipped by distributions. It seems to me that major
> >> releases like Sage 4.0 would be good candidates for these.
>
> >> I want to be really clear that I'm not asking that Sage change its rapid
> >> development model of aggressively fixing bugs in its dependencies. I'm
> >> only requesting that Sage occasionally do a release that works with
> >> dependencies that are available from the relevant upstream developers.
>
> >> What do people think about this proposal?
>
> -1 from me as a goal for 4.0, since we already have a very daunting
> challenge to accomplish the current goals for 4.0 in the timeframe we
> have set, unless of course you are volunteering to do all of the work
> :-).
>
> The proposal seems very reasonable post 4.0 though.
I doubt this will ever happen. Soon for example we plan to switch to
the svn version of pari which absolutely changes lots of things in
Sage in non-backward compatible ways, so you cannot use the stable
pari release with Sage any more. And given the timeframe the pari devs
do releases this does not bode well for stable releases.
Also: NTL releases maybe once a year, often less frequent, so the next
time we change something in the interface there won't be a release for
some time. While we will upgrade to NTL 5.5 soon I am not sure it will
be there in time for Sage 4.0.
The problem is that some upstream projects release slowly while others
are fast and do a point release when we submit a bugfix. One such
example is FLINT where I get an instant update when we fix something
or complain about a bug (i.e. see FLINT 1.2.3, 1.2.4, 1.2.5 the last
two weeks for build issues for example). I don't think there is any
reasonable way to guarantee that Sage will ship clean upstream every 3
or 6 months. I am happy to try, but I don't want any rule since fixing
a bug in Sage takes precedence over packaging concerns for me any day.
Sorry.
> - William
Cheers,
Michael
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