On Apr 23, 2:04 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 1:58 PM, mabshoff <mabsh...@googlemail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>
> > 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.
Another thing: In 3.4.1 we downgraded GAP to 4.4.10 from 4.4.12 that
was upgraded in Sage 3.3 due to a significant number of bugs and
issues in GAP 4.4.12. How would you deal with something like that in
the packaged version of Sage? The whole point about shipping nearly
every dependency in Sage was that we can do things like that because
it is the only way Sage does work reliably and pass doctests. That
does not really work too well with a distribution like Debain with
tens of thousands of packages. While the number of packages depending
on GAP are probably close to zero in Debian for something like NTL
this might be an issue.
Another problem is that often we have to put in fixes or use CVS for
non-Linux builds and with the Windows port this will become even more
extreme. So I truly don't see any reasonable hope we will ship clean
upstream anytime soon. Obviously if it is clean upstream and fixes in
patches in the spkg you can just ignore it.
> William
Cheers,
Michael
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
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
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
