Dear Nathann, Thanks for the message.
On Mar 11, 8:11 pm, Nathann Cohen <nathann.co...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello ! > > I do not know how whether I have my place in this discussion... > Several words, though. > > I know I did not take very well one of your first messages, and I > progressively got the impression you were showing contempt toward this > work. Well, perhaps this word is not the best one, and I totally agree > with Robert when he mentions native speakers. This may have mattered. > > Your first message was actually a request to change LP to MIP or MILP. > I know I very often do this, which is what you may call a mistake, > though as the difference between LP and MILP can always be deduced > from the context (or from the complexity of the problem mentionned), I > often forget it. > Well, I do not mind changing it, though I take it more as a stylistic > custom than something really important. You might, but a casual reader of that can be easily misled. > > Actually, this patch being an algorithm for the H-minor problem, whose > review I expected to be long and tedious, I did not expect to receive > as a first comment a request to fix a typo. You also mentionned the > slowness of the algorith, which I had mentionned previously : > I understand this implementation is in many cases impractical, but I > thought odd that you would mention yourself its slowness even before > having tested it. I would have taken your remark much more differently > if you had only said "I tried to find this minor on this graph, and it > took me 3 hours", or given examples of running times. You did not > mention this, and I got the impression you were criticizing the > slowness without having even tested it yourself, just to check. I > still do not know whether you did, only you know as you did not > explicitely mention it. Adding code to a public project is akin to publishing. You have to "sell" your code sufficiently, to take away doubts that it works on toy examples, right? > Saying, just after this, that depending on its slowness it may be > useless to work on including this in Sage was a bit to aggressive for > me, when I had no proof you had not just taken a quick look at it. > Then again, english is not my native language, nor do I know what you > really meant in the end. This is just how I understood your message. > > Later, you mentionned it may not scale, and I agreed with you, and you > sent another request : > > "can you test it on 20-25 vertices ?" > > I am sorry to have to say this, but I can obviously do it. As easily > as you would. It takes one line of Sage, namely :: > > sage : graphs.RandomGraph(30, .3).minor(graphs.CompleteGraph(5)) > > Or something alike. that's not what I would consider testing --- running something like this in a loop, taking time, perhaps, yes. > As communications on the Trac server, because of > differences in our timezones, can sometimes take several hours, I > found a bit odd to be asked to type just one command, when you can > have done it yourself and obtained the answer immediately. It is a bit > like that when one is asked several times questions that are included > in the manual. I do not mind answering them, but at some point one is > expected to try by oneself. This also gave me the impression you still > had not applied and tested the patch, which confirmed what I already > thought of your first comments... > > You also said "(by the way, "no K_4-minor" is equivalent to "treewidth > at most 2", so you can write another short function to test fro just > this...)". I think this is the place where, as Alex mentions it, a > reviewer is welcome to add a reviewer's patch. well, "you can" did not mean "you must"... It was just an offhand remark, that it might be a useful application of your code, especially as I recalled you taking about coding a treewidth computation. > Very often, when > reviewing patches, I notice many small things that would take much > time to be explained over a Trac ticker, but which can be fixed in > several seconds by a short patch, none of which can really be > "refused" by the original author. It can come from fixing typoes to > adding an example in the docstrings, but in this situation it would > have required to add a very short function -- a one-liner. I would > have greatly appreciated to see you wrote a small patch based on mine > just to add a one-liner. It may not be long to do, but it is a perfect > proof to show in interest in the work being done. It is also a way to > quickly add a function to Sage when you find it useful and relevant. > > Some time later, after these exchanges, you set the ticket to positive > review. I had, until then, absolutely no proof that you had read the > code. Actually, I hinted that you had not even applied the patch, and > none of your remarks had focused on the code. well, I did not take that hint lightly --- I can be lazy sometimes, but not THAT lazy and careless, you know... > > I hope you will not think I did not invest time in the review process. > In this very ticket, I was asked to write a document explaining the LP > formulation better than the comments in the code would have, and I did > it. You can almost think I wrote a 8-pages long LaTeX document just > because of this very review. It took me -- a lot -- of time. Actually > longer than the time it took me to write the actual patch, when I > think about it. > > Until now, I still do not know whether you read it, which was the > whole point of writing it. No, I didn't really --- but I didn't ask for it, either. Jason and David (Joyner) did ask for it, not me... > > I also read the following line from you : > > //// > Please fix this, otherwise I'll have to revert to "needs work" :) by the way it was 2nd time I had to point out that terminology must be fixed, sorry... > (I > wish I had such an efficient means to make my students work hard :)) > //// > > Well, I now know you are not a PhD student. I am. I wrote "students", not "PhD students". I also have undergraduates to teach, and, gosh, 99% of them are lazy as hell... > I do not mind > working hard, I quite like both my job and the science I study, but I > take very badly the custom of some researchers to consider PhD student > as some unexpectedly useful form of animal life. One does not *make* > students work hard. One *asks* them. They can quit whenever they want, > this is the difference between them and slaves. I happen to have wonderful PhD students, and I treat them with full respect, I must assure you. And I even fix, myself, English in their LaTeX files... And, like you, I hate these PhD supervisors who are slave drivers, who insist that their names are always added on the lists of authors of whatever their PhD students publish, etc... Having said that, it's part of a teacher's job to make students work, there isn't anything wrong with this. Student's work is to learn, and learning is not always pleasant (and, indeed, they can quit, anyway, unlike slaves). Or they can fail many exams and be expelled for this... But it's part of the thing: "no pain, no gain" applies not only to sport, but to gaining knowledge, too. Students should not assume that by virtue of being admitted to a university they will get their diploma... (OK, I got carried away here...) > > I said much more than "a few words", in the end. I will stop here as > it is the place where I have to apologize. I wrote all this to try to > make our misunderstanding clear, but I know that at some point I could > have avoided our conversation to lead a bit too far, which I failed to > do. So I apologize. > > About the propositions you made, and I hope you will consider my > opinion as kindly as you would consider the opinion of any other, I do > not think anonymous reviewing would help. We're working together, and you know, it did start up, for me, as a joke, a suggestion of having anonymous reviewing. But it went so far that it got very real. :-) > there is nothing to earn by working on a free software. We are just > trying to build something together. Even if some, like me, sometimes > forget we have no reason at all to fight each other as we are all > working in the same direction, I believe as William said it that we > are the ones at fault. > > With anonymous reviewers, the quality of review, and the whole > interest of working together would disappear. > > Please receive my apologies, once more. Received and accepted, no problem... I'll review some more of your tickets then (so please don't get mad at me if I will again insist on "mixed integer" all over the place). I also plan to submit an implementation of computing Lovasz theta- function of a graph, and some of its relatives, and you'll be most welcome to review these. Dmitrii > > Nathann Cohen -- 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
