One of the main point I took into account was the necessity of not adding a significant amount of work to the community, actually. Basically, my only point was aimed to take advantage of something that I think we already have, but that we don't value enough right now. As I see it, I think that it could probably be a good idea to slightly change the download page, as the user is provided the choice of which version of Sage to download: either the Sage "current release" which provides all the exciting new features, constantly updated, or the Sage "conservative release", which is somehow poorer in terms of features, but it's more polished in the corners of what is in it. If, as I understood it (I might be wrong), this kind of releases already take place once in a while (which I think, make a lot of sense), it is just a matter of underline them and make them available for a little longer, and contemporary to the other current releases which happen in the meantime. I think that out there there are a lot of people which would consider VERY useful to get a slightly older software, but with increased stability and reliability, and I don't think there's something wrong with it. I think that in this way a lot of people could join the community, and help as well, without the need of being very active developers at the same time; that would allow this kind of people to use Sage for their current work (because they can access to a very reliable release), and provide something back in the long term (as you know, it's very easy to become addicted!). I don't even think the "conservative" should be considered Long Term Support releases (in the sense that we should backport all the bug fixing to those releases); I know that also "conservative" releases can have bugs, but this doesn't mean we have to fix'em all with the consequence of slowing down the development. Do you think it would be so much overhead to check if the upgrade from the previous "conservative" release to the next one works correctly? Shouldn't it come almost directly from checking the working upgrade of every single current version?
Best regards Maurizio On 25 Ott, 15:48, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 10:17 PM, Robert Bradshaw > > > > <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > > > On Oct 24, 2009, at 7:10 PM, Jason Grout wrote: > > >> mhampton wrote: > > >>> One thing that was mentioned on another thread is that the version > >>> number for sage-4.1.2 was quite misleading. It would help a lot if > >>> the version numbers were more grounded in reality. One simple change > >>> might be to not pick the version number until a final release has > >>> been > >>> decided on. Perhaps we could call the next release "sage-next" until > >>> it is finalized. > > >> +1 > > > +1 from me too. > > -1 from me, from both a social and technical perspective. > > 1. Technical: It will be a huge amount of work and introduce all kinds > of bugs (technically) if we call the next release "sage-next" instead > of what it will actually be, and I suspect it will be confusing > (socially) as well. As just one example, if you were to upgrade > Sage from version 4.1.2 to version "next", then upgrading to version > 4.2 from "next" would be completely broken. > > 2. Social: It is very common for trac comments, comments in source > code, discussion in email, etc., to have references such as "this > fixes a problem in sage-x.y.z.alpha2", or "this was merged into > sage-x.y.z.alpha3", or "we fixed this in sage-x.y.z.alpha1 so expect > to see this in sage-x.y.z when it is released". There are hundreds of > such comments connected with every single release. All such comments > become meaningless if x.y.z is replaced by "next". > > Neither of these problems is insurmountable. But I don't have the > time or inclination myself to surmount them. > > -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
