On Nov 3, 2009, at 12:55 AM, Ralf Hemmecke wrote: >> How does WRI "support deprecated code"? And for how long? > > One difference between a company like WRI and the Sage project is that > WRI charges for its product to get money to do (among other things) > maintenance of old versions or caring about upgrade procedures. > > A pragmatic approach for Sage is: If there are enough resources then > old > code can be supported, if not then not.
I think this is a very important point. > Even though I am very much for free an open software, if there are no > resources then the project cannot care too much about legacy code. > Sage > is mostly done by volunteers. Nobody (except the people paid for > working > on Sage) can be forced to care about things that he/she is not > interested in. > > BTW, free (in the sense of the GPL) does not mean gratis. > > Of course, it would be good to help users to make a smooth transition > from one version to another, but caring too much about 10-year-old > versions removes resources from progressing Sage. It seems silly to talk of 10-year-old legacy code for a project that is less than 5 years old... As the project matures this will become more important, but we're still pretty young now and don't want to lock ourselves into previous bad design decisions. Also, it's not like an OS where there are mission critical servers running that need security updates and bug fixes for an indefinite period of time. I'd also like to point out that most of us do take backwards compatibility seriously--part of this is the 100,000s of regression tests (including non-documentation, and we'd love to have more books, papers, etc. that we could automatically tests to ensure published materials don't go out of date). Nor do we take deprecating things lightly. We also provide the sources for any previous release (and it'd be great to provide binaries, or even VMs, but that is again a question of resources). - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
