On Sun, 2 Aug 2020 at 14:48, David Bailey <d...@dbailey.co.uk> wrote: > > I am amazed that you and other SymPy developers find time to develop the > software after they have finished evaluating and responding to all the offers > from students. Are you sure the time you all spend on this doesn't cost more > than the help you receive?
In the early phase any new contributor will take more time to advise than it would take for a more experienced contributor to do the work directly. However as contributors become more experienced that turns around. This applies to all contributors as well as GSOC students. The difference with GSOC is that a student is then paid to work full time on a project for 3 months and the outcome from that is definitely more than mentors could achieve given the same amount of time working on the problem directly. By the end of that a GSOC student will have substantial experience with both the codebase and the workflow and they can often continue to be a regular contributor afterwards. > I can certainly see that you need to make some changes, but I can't believe > that more bureaucracy can help. I see SEPs as documents outlining high-level design and implementation planning. I don't consider that bureaucracy: those are two things that sympy sorely lacks at the moment. I think there are a number of active contributors who have clear ideas about what they think should be done to improve sympy in future but there is no forum in which to have that bigger picture discussion so that anyone else understands those ideas. If the agreed plans were clear then I think that there are capable and willing contributors who would invest time in implementing them. > The biggest thing SymPy needs is comprehensive documentation - preferably up > to the standard of Mathematica. Yes, better documentation is needed. There is work going on to improve that. It's hard in many cases though to write the documentation without having a clear idea what the future of sympy is supposed to be. It's not even always clear who the documentation is intended for i.e. which parts of sympy are "public" or "private". Oscar -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAHVvXxRO4j0%2BvRA3Ksns290ERvzEkHW2S21FiBn2DCJGbnhyzA%40mail.gmail.com.
