Is there even a link from which Sympow can be downloaded so that one can look through the code to see if it is worth salvaging. I can't even find a webpage for Mark Watkins at the moment, let alone sympow.
I honestly suspect that Mark has just moved on to other projects. I doubt very much if his work on Magma precludes him from maintaining this package. I've personally worked with him on projects since he joined the Magma group and we both made use of each other's code without even asking the question. But, we should be more selective when including packages. IMHO, from the start, sympow should have been merged to become part of a larger library of functionality, though to be honest, I'm not quite sure where it exactly belongs. I don't think it belongs in flint as such. Maybe Pari? I'm also really wondering why cephes is in Sage. Unless there are two packages with the same name, it was last updated circa 1994 and uses non-portable long doubles. We've booted packages from Sage for much less felonious offences. Is there a modularity problem here? I always thought that given Sage sees itself as more of a distribution (like linux) than a single project, then all but a very small number of core libs should be able to be added/removed from Sage at the flick of a switch. It sure would've made a Windows port easier! Is it too late to fix the spkg system to be more modular. Is there even an efficient method in Python of conditionally including code based on availability of prereqs? I know this exists at some levels, for example GMP vs MPIR or NTL vs FLINT or zn_poly vs FLINT vs Pari for Z/nZ[x], etc. But this only seems to be where one library can substitute for another, which is rare. Could this be extended and still efficient? For example I don't think you want to be checking in Python whether you have GMP loaded every time you go to add two integers together. But then maybe with the possibility of a choice between MPIR and GMP at the spkg level, GMP/MPIR should be viewed as essential to Sage and thus a core lib? Maybe ALL the libraries in Sage are considered core and only those packages which are optional spkgs are considered truly.... optional. If so, I think the core is potentially unwieldy and may be contributing to some of the maintenance issues..... Bill. On 16 Aug, 13:55, John Cremona <john.crem...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 16 August 2010 13:38, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > > > On 08/16/10 11:51 AM, John Cremona wrote: > > >> The spkg sympow (Mark Watkins's C library for computing symmetric > >> power L-functions, which applications) is causing more and more > >> problems (see #9705 for example) > > > John, > > > I think you mean #9703 - #9705 looks unrelated to SYMPOW to me. > > Correct. (Eyesight not what it was...) > > John > > > > > > > #9166 (Cygwin related) is another relevant ticket, though there's probably > > more information on #9703. > > > 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 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
