On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 1:58 PM, mabshoff <mabsh...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > > > 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.
I agree that it is laudable to aim for, but not something we should ever try to guarantee. It just doesn't make sense. William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
