On Sunday, August 28, 2011, rjf <[email protected]> wrote: > 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, Not true. We get very substantial financial support specifically targeted at bug fixing related tasks. > 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 > -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- 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
