On 1 February 2010 06:02, Nick Alexander <ncalexan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I hate to think that the only people that are valid contributors to Sage >> are >> mathematicians. So, doing the release management, fixing bugs, >> documentation, or >> maintaining the web site aren't important? > > Not at all. But take away mathematics, and we don't have a *product*. Take > away release management, fixing bugs, documentation, or maintaining the web > site and we have an inferior project, but we still have a project. Without a web site, it would not be a product available to anyone easily. > Take > away support for Solaris or HP-UX, and we don't serve what appears, to me, > to be a small market. (Certainly small compared to the potential pool of > Microsoft Windows users.) Sun have donated a T5240, which William accepted. They have also given him significant hardware discounts on other items. The main file server, 'disk' is a Sun running Open Solaris. I believe sage.math is a Sun running Linux, though I am not sure of that fact. Only the other week, Willaim sent me an email telling me how important it was to get the Solaris port completed. I'm not denying the Windows port would get more users. than Solaris. People are working on the Cygwin port. I have no intension of running Sage on HP-UX. But I do believe that by making code more portable, one does uncover bugs which do not show up on one platform, but wait to hit you at a later date. I once spent ages trying to trac down a bug on AIX, which was not reproducible, but did occasionally occur. When I eventually found the bug, I realised it would have affected any platform (including Linux), but had just not showed up before. An ex-colleage who tested his code on a quad processor SPARC for the first time, found a bug which could have affected him on Linux, but he had not noticed it. Dave -- 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
