After a little bit of further consideration, I think that the fact that the alleged bug list is public does not effectively mitigate the problem of (mis-)directing bugs to the people who are (un-)likely to be able to address them. For example, bugs directed toward Maxima developers turned out to be bugs somewhere else (usage of expect??). Who knows who caused a problem if sympy is sometimes used but sometimes not?
With no one truly capable of understanding ALL of Sage, and no one being paid to process bugs, it seems to me that bugs --- except those bugs that affect virtually everyone --- may linger unsolved either on the main Sage trac, or in some mis-directed bug list. There are certainly some people who (unpaid) look at and fix bugs out of curiosity, pride, generosity, etc. But sometimes they are not the right people. The "assume" functionality in Maxima has had some "misfeatures" since it was written (circa 1970). I would say that the Sage software organization is less likely to promote prompt bug fixing, at least if it is not a bug in the python core. Also, from what I have seen, some bugs are caused by the interaction of different modules each of which is free of bugs taken in isolation. It's OK to say "this is how bugs are tracked in Sage". Holding up Sage as a model for how software should be developed and debugged... not so clear. As for whether it is useful for the documentation to tell you about the internals of a program... I think it depends on the value of "you". RJF On Aug 28, 12:03 pm, Maarten Derickx <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sunday, August 28, 2011 9:22:59 AM UTC-7, rjf wrote: > > > Maxima's bug list is public. > > > If there are bugs from the Sage community that are really bugs (or > > alleged bugs) in Maxima, the appearance of a bug report in Sage's trac > > is pretty much irrelevant. If it works the same way with other > > subsystems, then it is pretty much irrelevant, unless Maxima > > developers are magically informed. > > > Of course it's impossible to magically decide wether a sage bug comes from > > some bug in maxima. But as soon a sage developer tracks down that the bug is > really caused another package on witch sage depends, it will of course get > reported upstream by that developer (we even have a field on trac to record > the status of the bug report in upstream). -- To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
