Sage is very lucky indeed that Pari exists and is as good as it is for many things. Sage is also very lucky that you (Jeroen) exist since you have been very useful to *both* projects, working hard to improve both, and on particular reporting -- and fixing -- a lot of "upstream" bugs, i.e. bugs in Pari. The set of Pari developers is so small (essentially 2) that personalities matter. I know both Karim and Bill well, but just last week was so annoyed with Bill's reaction on pari-dev tha I did actually unsubscribe from that list. You have given us more examples if this stubborn-ness.
Perhaps we need more Sage people active on pari-dev (I could re-join!) to up-vote such changes. I think Karim is much more aware of the value of Pari to the wider community than Bill, especially if due credit is given to Pari where it is used within Sage. (I'm sure many Sage users do not know how much Pari is used for come very important functionality, such as most number field stuff.) I would be very worried by an explicit fork. What about maintainability? John On 26 September 2014 09:32, Jeroen Demeyer <jdeme...@cage.ugent.be> wrote: > Hello sage-devel, > > The upstream situation with PARI has always been somewhat difficult. The > don't easily accept patches written by people which are not in their inner > circle. That, plus the importance of PARI inside Sage, is probably also one > of the reasons that PARI in Sage has so many patches. > > I have been working on the upgrade to the PARI git master (#16997), which is > in theory ready for review. The main new feature is an implementation of > Kedlaya for (hyper)elliptic curve point counting. > > In that ticket, I would like to add two patches to PARI adding new > functionality, which unfortunately upstream refuses. Personally, I think we > should add these two patches to PARI-in-Sage anyway, regardless of what > upstream thinks. This will create a small "fork" between upstream PARI and > PARI-in-Sage. Hopefully, over time upstream will change their mind and > accept those patches after all. > > If somebody has advice about how to deal with this situation or has reasons > why adding functionality to the PARI-in-Sage is absolutely not acceptable, I > would love to hear. > > Regards, > Jeroen. > > > Details about the 2 patches: > > * infinity.patch: PARI has a new infinity type but in upstream's version, > this type is almost useless. My patch allows basic arithmetic (like 2*oo > gives oo), which is needed to not break Denis Simon's scripts. > Rejected by upstream because "Purposefully, we restricted the semantic > attached to oo. Most of the time such operations are the symptom of a bug." > > * ispseudoprimepower.patch: add a new function ispseudoprimepower() which is > like isprimepower() but without a primality proof. This could be used in > Sage for GF(p^n, proof=False). > Upstream's reaction: "Well, but who would use it ?" > > In #16997, I am also adding other patches: > > * qfparam_primpart.patch: fixes PARI bug #1611, upstream has not yet > commented on this. > * public_memory_functions.patch: make some private functions public. I > consider this a transitional patch to keep using Sage's memory handling code > for PARI. Upstream has changed a lot the way they deal with the PARI stack. > For the moment, we don't use these functions, but in some future ticket we > can have a look at it. Because of the transitional nature, not submitted to > upstream. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sage-devel" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
