I was a little disappointed that 4.3.1 was released, when I'd made it quite
clear there was a *new* problem, introduced since 4.3, which was causing the
build on Solaris SPARC to fail, despite earlier versions working on SPARC.
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/7990
(I marked it as a blocker)
Sage 4.2.1 did build on SPARC, as long as the Sun compilers were not installed.
(One part in Sage, chose the Sun C++ compiler in preference to g++, which caused
a failure. If the Sun compilers were not available, or their install directory
temporarily moved, then Sage 4.2.1 and later would build on Solaris SPARC).
Evidence can be seen here, of Sage running on Solaris SPARC
http://t2nb.math.washington.edu:8000/
The last remaining problem, which allowed Sage to build irrespective of whether
the Sun compilers were installed or not, was fixed several weeks ago and merged
into sage-4.3.1.alpha0.
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/6595
I have thought for some time that the frequency of public releases is too fast
to allow proper testing. (By public, I mean x.y.z releases, not alpha or release
candidate releases).
William has said of the 4.3.1 release "There were billions of tickets closed and
bugs fixed"
http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/d0468fe68a62c18c
Within less than 5 hours of 4.3.1 being released, there are people saying it
does not build on Ubuntu, which is an officially supported platform, on which
Sage has for a long time built ok. I'd raised the issue that the earlier release
candidate did not build on SPARC, despite older versions building.
Would it not be more sensible to test that a release actually builds properly on
supported platforms before making it public? In other words, introduce a much
longer delay between the expected final release, and that something actually
being released. Its obviously an impossible task for the release managers to do
this themselves, but other developers can test versions if they are given time.
On a similar point, I also find it odd that code in the Sage library, which is
written by Sage developers, generates so many warnings from the compilers.
Dave
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