On 13 February 2024 00:58:04 GMT, Nils Bruin <nbr...@sfu.ca> wrote:
>On Monday 12 February 2024 at 15:58:11 UTC-8 Dima Pasechnik wrote:
>
>What's rotten and decaying - well, the most obvious points are:
>
>* pynac (memory leaks, bugs, sketchy or no docs, authors left long time
>ago)
>
>* commutative algebra, in particular Singular-based (memory leaks,
>bugs, no docs, authors either left or are not willing to look into it
>much), etc.
>
>* maxima (bugs, bugs, bugs)
>
>* broken optional packages, e.g. p_group_cohomology
>
>
>Each of those components could definitely use attention. However, the skill
>set required to work on those components is quite different from that on
>working on (re)packaging existing, maintained python projects. People
>choose what they work on.
This is not quite correct. People have a sense of duty. If e.g. Sage docs
don't build, someone has to fix this? It's a higher priority task than fixing a
particular maths-related bug.
Certainly some people are happy to ignore pleas for help with re-packaging and
maintaining packages, and use their maths skillsets, but it's hard for many to
do so.
One does not need a maths degree to cut and paste lists of files, or write
autoconf macros, yet that's what I was doing for quite a part of my
contributions. Out of sense of duty, cause it was something needed, or it
looked like something needed.
And it causes quite a riot now when I dare to question the need for a large
part of these packaging business...
> I think we have a problem if we don't have anyone
>willing/able to work on pynac or singular or maxima. But I'm not sure this
>has very much to do with people working on (re)packaging other software.
One can alleviate parts of these problems by connecting other potential
backends to sage, e.g. symengine to become a replacement for pynac.
>
>The discussion about whether a sage-the-distribution should exist and how
>it relates to sage-the-library definitely needs to be resolved at some
>point and, whatever decision is made, people need to accept that's the
>consensus and move on until the next time it needs to be reconsidered, but
>I don't think that the resolution of that issue will alleviate the lack of
>maintainers of pynac etc.
Pynac is beyond salvation.
We need a collective momentum and a sense of urgency to fix it in a good way.
And the same for the rest of the issues I listed.
But right now we have 300 irrelevant to maths standard packages with versions
controlled in 5 different ways which sits in our way and hard to ignore.
>
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