Robert Bradshaw wrote:
On Mar 19, 2010, at 3:18 AM, Dima Pasechnik wrote:
Craig,
[...]
For the record, I think it's pretty unreasonable to *require* Sage
developers to test on anything but their own machine -- but I *do*
think it's very reasonable to ask them to help fix problems with their
patches that arise on other architectures, especially if we can give
them a place to ssh and try things out.
well, as soon as it it is past vanilla Python/Cython, it becomes
unclear whether
a given change will not break functionality on another platform.
So I do not see how in this case one can limit testing to one platform
only.
E.g. I went out of my way to test an upgrade of the GAP spkg on any
platform I could get my hands on.
For spkgs, changes to shell scripts, etc. a it is much more important to
test on a wide variety of platforms. Fortunately, most contributions are
plain vanilla Python/Cython.
Thanks for bringing this up, this is an example of what separates (in my
mind) the "sage-build" level stuff from the "sage-devel" level stuff.
- Robert
What you say about 'most' being Python/Cython is undoubtedly true.
However, there is still a significant number of .spkg updates each release.
The recent update to R, which screwed up on Solaris, resulted in iconv being
added to Sage rather hurriedly (directly as a standard package). Iconv seems to
be the cause of some problems on Fedora building gd, though it appears it can be
solved by removing an option to gd's configure script.
IMHO, the updates to .spkg files are not being done carefully enough. R's .spkg
had the option '--with-iconv=no'. Whatever platform you built R on, there was a
warning of this unrecognised option, but of course it was either unnoticed or
ignored.
In fact, I can't even find the ticket that updated R. The SPKG.txt shows:
=== r-2.10.1 (Karl-Dieter Crisman, January 15, 2010) ===
* Readline import issue is now fixed in R
* Re-enable recommended packages
* Upgrade rpy2 to 2.0.8
* FreeBSD support improved (patch by Peter Jeremy)
=== r-2.9.2 (Jason Grout, Sept 20, 2009) ===
* Also disable aqua support on 64 bit OSX
I really believe there is too much emphasis on quantity in Sage, and too little
on quality.
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
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscribegooglegroups.com or
reply to this email with the words "REMOVE ME" as the subject.
