Hi! On 3 Aug., 16:51, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > ... > > (a) Experienced people are busy on the small lists, thus, read sage- > > support less frequently, thus, the big lists are less responsive. > > This is not my experience. If not for the small lists, some of these > experienced people would just read *no lists*.
I think experienced people (in the sense of "people that are willing to contribute but have a certain research interest that they want to adhere to) would read a list if (a) it is not too big and (b) contains enough stuff that they find interesting. (a) and (b) together means that only little effort is needed to filter what is not relevant. I believe that a list with less than 10 posts per day (that would be sage-nt plus sage-algebra plus sage-combinat-devel) is small or at most medium sized. > If they make the time to read the big lists, they will just read all > of the lists of interest to them anyways. That's two points: 1. I'd reverse your statement. If they make the time to read four small lists, they will just read the same information in a single list of medium size. I don't receive e-mails from the sage lists, but read them in my browser. I find it embarrassing to have to open six tabs in order to see all interesting lists, and I find it embarrassing that very often in four out of six tabs nothing is happening for days! I'd find it less embarrassing to have less tabs open, and simply ignore those posts whose subject line isn't appealing to me (what I do anyway). I guess the same would hold for people receiving e-mails: Plonking a mail after reading the subject line takes very little time. 2. We have seen in John Cremona's post above that he has not been aware that sage-combinat-devel contains stuff that was interesting to him. It seems to me that discussions on the category framework often take place on sage-combinat-devel (perhaps for historical reasons), although I think that the topic clearly belongs to sage-algebra as well. Thus, even if someone is willing to read the lists of interests, s/he is not necessarily succeeding, if there are many small lists. In reality, s/he will *not* read all lists of interest! > > The situation four years ago was much different. Both sage-devel and > > sage-support were very responsive, and that has been one major reason > > for choosing Sage as a platform for my computational projects. > > I don't agree that sage-support and sage-devel have become overally > noticeable less *responsive* than they were four years ago, at least > since I've been watching them closely during the last month or two, > though there is less traffic (as I've observed). I think there are > more subscribers to both lists today then there were in 2007. Responsiveness can not be measured in terms of numbers of subscribers or numbers of posts, IMHO. It should be measured in the latency between a question and its answer. Perhaps I am glorifying the past. But my impression is rather clear: The latency has multiplied. I distinctly remember that I was rather impressed by the fact that my first posts on sage-devel and sage-support (four years ago or so) where answered within few hours, and bugs were fixed within days. And today? Some questions are unanswered for days (that also holds on ask-sage, by the way), and some tickets are waiting for review since months. > As a specialist, and having read both lists recently, I have concerns > about merging sage-combinat-devel with sage-nt. The discussion on > sage-combinat-devel is much, much different than sage-nt, and to some > extent the lists are mutually incomprehensible. Think positively! Think about the overlap (as I mentioned: Categories and stuff) rather than the differences! > ..., and I can't imagine sage-combinat-devel > readers wanting to read a lot about subtle issues involving elliptic > curve point counting, say. Usually, the subject lines of the "offensive" posts contain the words "elliptic curve" or "combinat queue", respectively. That's trivially ignorable. > Merging the sage-windows list with sage-devel is not the only way to > raise alertness. Another approach would be for somebody to post > periodic updates to sage-devel about windows porting work, along with > a note that says: "get involved by: > * subscribing to sage-windows; * downloading and building sage > following the directions athttp://xxx, etc." OK. But that isn't happening, or is it? > Also, there are quite a lot of people who are highly involved with > Sage development work, and who read sage-devel, but have > (unfortunately) zero interest in porting Sage to Windows. Same as above: The subject line would contain the offensive word "Windows" or "cygwin". > But > I'm not in favor of barraging them with messages about porting Sage to > Windows (or Solaris or anything else), since I greatly value their > contributions to the platform-independent parts of Sage. I have problems to understand what you mean by "barraging". Actually I have problems to understand how you could possibly come to the idea of using the word "barraging" for an amount of one message per day (on average). Cheers, Simon -- 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
