On 02/ 1/11 08:50 AM, David Roe wrote:
I think most people agree that a Windows port is important.
But there's no plan for Sage, which sets out priorities and reasonable estimates
of time.
But it still
hasn't happened. My impression is that the reasons for that are primarily
that it's
1) hard,
2) not interesting to most Sage developers.
There's not much that we can do about the difficulty; if we want it to
happen we need to address the second point. Sage isn't a project where we
can really tell people that they have to work on something. Personally, I'm
completely uninterested in working on a Windows port.
I don't know how hard it is, but I got the impression from William only a few
months back that it did not need a lot of work. But I've come very suspicious
about time estimates from many Sage developers.
One ticket I was aware was outstanding was that SYMPOW was not working. That got
fixed when I realised it was an issue on Solaris, so I sorted it out.
We've tried hiring someone to work on porting Sage to Windows, and it wasn't
that successful.
My understanding was that Microsoft sponsored a student for a short period of
time (2-3 months). It was blatantly obvious to me that it would have not been
done in that time scale. I think that was supposed to be a native port too - not
Cygwin. A native port is a *much* harder problem.
To my knowledge, there was nobody else paid to work on a Windows port, but I may
be wrong.
I know Micheal was paid to work on the *Solaris* port, but went off on a tangent
and did his own thing. To my knowledge, Micheal was the only full time person
paid to work on Sage.
But if there was a plan for Sage, like there is for other projects, with
estimated dates for specific targets, and those kept slipping, then we would be
aware there's a problem.
Regularly slipping time scales should then be fed back to the people making the
estimates. They would hopefully realise they were unrealistic in their
expectations.
Once that is realised, more realistic time scales would be set for future Sage
goals. Then priorities could be set, based on knowledge of what are realistic
time scales.
All this is pretty much standard software engineering principles.
Just waiting until people decide to work on it isn't
achieving anything. One way we've traditionally had success in gathering
momentum for a project is hosting a Sage Days workshop. One focused on
Windows development might achieve something, if we can find the funding for
it.
Some of the problems seem to be firmly in the hands of people who have written
code in the Sage library, which simply does not work properly on Cygwin. They
should be able to sort that out.
Some of the portability issues are not trivial IMHO, but just need hard work. I
agree it's not the most interesting thing. I also think the time estimates I've
seen are totally unrealistic.
What is obvious to me is how close the correlation is between Cygwin issues and
code I'd previously identified as being very badly written.
I can't help feeling William was unwise to start Psage before the Cygwin port of
Sage was complete.
The only other thing I can think of would be to hire someone, IF we can find
someone with the necessary qualifications and determination. I don't know
how feasible that is, or whether funding for that project would be
available. I have to think that the people who might have funded it may be
discouraged by previous failures.
I personally would not let previous failures put me off. Micheal spent a couple
of years working on a Solaris port, but his failure did not put me off. I knew
it could be done.
Even though I don't want to work on it, I'll be a cheerleader for those of
you who do. :-)
David
Sage is something people work on in their spare time, so you can't dictate to
people what they do. But if there was a plan, people could be encouraged to work
on what is considered important. Student projects could be based around specific
goals.
We should also have status reports. See for example some of the archived FreeBSD
status reports.
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2009-04-2009-09.html
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2008-10-2008-12.html
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2008-07-2008-09.html
To me at least, it seems the vast majority of people ware working on what
interests them, and those changes get put into Sage, without any discussion of
what's actually needed in Sage, and what should be written as an external program.
* No documented plan
* No real documented estimates of time scales
* No status reports for the project as a whole.
--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Dave
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