I agree that the issue here is not whether David has contributed a lot or not. He's contributed, and that is what counts.
The issue here is the cost of a port. If it is borne by David and people who volunteer to help him, then I have no problem with a port. But if it takes the form: 1) Complaint about problem x with package y by David on sage-devel 2) Email to maintainer of package y complaining about x 3) Maintainer of package y eventually fixes issue x 4) Goto 1 then I will *not* be a happy camper. I will especially not be happy if the suggestion is to replace package y with package y' because package y doesn't support HP-UX and the maintainer of package y doesn't want to support the port. Ports are complicated issues. I recently tried to port some packages to the TCC compiler which produces native binaries on Windows and is quite similar to the GNU compiler. But my mathematical career soon got in the way. I didn't find time to do more than a weekend of work on it in the last 3 months. Ports require who communities of interested people behind them, especially when the project is as large as Sage. How to do a successful port is a non-trivial issue which this community has not solved yet, in my humble opinion. But there is hope, especially if resources don't become bogged down in dead-end projects. Bill. On Feb 1, 8:10 pm, Martin Albrecht <m...@informatik.uni-bremen.de> wrote: > On Monday 01 February 2010, Nick Alexander wrote: > > > > I think I've done a LOT for Sage - I would request you do not > > > purposely break the PA-RISC support in MPIR, when it clearly passes > > > all your self tests on HP-UX. I do not believe thiat is an > > > unreasonable request. > > > I take issue with the claim that you have done "a LOT" for Sage. Let > > me be clear: I appreciate the effort you put into porting Sage to > > other architectures. But I question how many people are interested in > > actually using Sage on those architectures. > > Hi Nick, > > I get your frustration and I appreciate how much it must be for you to react > so strongly. > > We don't all have to agree what a big contribution is and what not. Some > people really appreciate the porting efforts some people don't care. I also > get that the additional burden scares people of, yet another platform one does > not care about to worry about. > > Support for Solaris does not mean that every Sage developer has to work with > it and to support it. > > I really see no need for a competition who is more valuable etc. and I really > see no need to *take issue* with David's claim that he did a lot for Sage. I > personally think he did. > > One the other hand, we should all (including David) maybe take a step back and > appreciate that most people on this list are volunteers and that any demanding > tone will not get us anywhere. We all do it from time to time, when we are > frustrated, but it does not help anyone. > > Cheers, > Martin > > -- > name: Martin Albrecht > _pgp:http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99 > _otr: 47F43D1A 5D68C36F 468BAEBA 640E8856 D7951CCF > _www:http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb > _jab: martinralbre...@jabber.ccc.de -- 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
