Hi David, First, I want to thank you for all the work you've been doing to get Sage to play nicely on Sun and HP-UX recently. I think that's really helpful, and in particular, I think some of the comments you make below are definitely things that will help Mike (or anyone else) make lcalc better.
That said, I think you're often extremely rude in the way you phrase things, either on purpose or by accident. For instance: > I have been less than impressed with lcalc itself. > Really? Have you used it to compute any zeros of L-functions? Have you found that it's slow at computing values of L(s,f) for certain modular forms? Are you unhappy with Mike's code involving the approximate functional equation? Or are you just unhappy that it's failing to build on your particular OS/hardware configuration? Mike doesn't seem to keep a list of "supported platforms" on the lcalc webpage anywhere; maybe he's part of the vast majority of people who don't use a Solaris machine as one of his development platforms. In short, I think "builds on a variety of hard-to-find Unix systems" is a metric that's much less important than "performs some interesting mathematical computation correctly." I'd say that maybe this was a one-off thing, but you've had strong negative comments for most of the packages you've looked at -- I remember PolyBoRi in specific, but I know there were others. I'm *not* saying you shouldn't report these bugs -- I think it's extremely helpful that you're taking the time to test all the components of Sage on other Unixes. I'm just asking that you be a little more polite when you report them. For instance, you could have started this email by saying "I've run into a few problems trying to build lcalc on this hardware configuration." Remember, the people writing these pieces of software aren't hardened software developers or system administrators -- they're mathematicians who happen to enjoy writing software. Seeing their name show up in an angry sage-devel or sage-support email isn't going to bring us into their good graces. -cc -- 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
