>I feel that I have done more than a reasonable amount of work here. Do >you agree or disagree?
Have you done a reasonable amount of work? That's for you to judge since you're the person with the need. But lets see what seems to be going on with Clisp. Sam's reply to you seems to be that you need a certain combination of operating systems and compilers and libraries to generate a supported build. (This is very similar to the reply to my Sage bug report, essentially "fix your compiler".) So the expected response would be for you to reinstall Solaris to the "correct" version with the "correct" libraries and the bug goes away. Asking a user to "fix their system" is not a valid response but that seems to be the essence of the replies. Ask yourself why you might get this kind of response. Sam (and Camm) may have time constraints. I know that Camm does the work in his free time. I know Camm is working on a massive rewrite (probably NOT in public). I don't know what Sam does for a living but I suspect his work is also a free time activity. Axiom is also free time support. Dormant bug reports are not an indication of inactivity. Sage may have a few bug reports that are a few months old. Clisp is free software. You have the source code, you have the need, post a patch. Sam (and Camm) may have hardware/operating system constraints. Possibly the boxen that they use are borrowed and they cannot reproduce your exact environment. I have 9 physical machines here with 32 virtual boxen and I still cannot reproduce all of the combinations. I don't have access to a Sparc, for instance. Sourceforge took down their compile farm and HP doesn't have a large set in their farm. Axiom runs in many more places than I publish but there are outstanding build issues so I won't claim it "runs" anywhere but on a published subset of combinations. You do the same thing (e.g. no redhat9 gcc x.x.x). I did ask Google, Microsoft, and Sourceforge to put up compile farms but nothing happened. If we all used a "standard compile farm" this problem might be minimized. For now, though, the odds are good that Sam does not have your Solaris machine configuration and cannot reproduce your bug. We are both in the same business; you package Sage to run everywhere and I package Axiom to run everywhere. As soon as you touch anything at all, something breaks. When GCL breaks, I post a patch and locally apply the patch until it is accepted upstream (if at all). If Clisp fails for you then fix it, post a patch, locally apply the patch until it gets applied upstream, and move on. It is not a question of "reasonable amount of work". It is a question of expectations. What, exactly, do you expect? Instant, top-of-the-pile bug fixes on all of YOUR hardware/software combinations? This is free and open source software. The only thing you can expect is to get the source code so you can fix it and post a patch. Everything else is not in the contract. That's why people pay for software. Franz would be willing to fix your issues immediately. I'm not sure your check to Sam has cleared yet. If you don't want to build patches then send Sam a contract. I'm sure he'd be happy to get paid. Sage will have this same problem in the future as various package maintainers move on or you can no longer reach your Sparc. What if your expectations are not fulfilled? Well, that generally leads to anger and frustration, both natural reactions. But it seems that you have used "hasty generalization" to conclude that Lisp is dead. And from there to conclude that Lisp should be removed from everywhere. That's a shame because Maxima contains an astonishing amount of well debugged algorithms by recognized experts in the field. And characterizing Lisps like SBCL (fork of CMUCL, child of the CMU Spice Lisp research project) as "polishing a turd", implies that Scott Fahlman wasted his time studying dynamic language optimization in compilers. Python has yet to even think about these issues, most of which have already been solved by Scott. Everywhere else in Sage I see people struggle over milliseconds. Then I see Maxima built on Clisp (an interpreter) rather than SBCL, a optimizing compiler. Ultimately the point of my post was that, despite not seeing immediate results, it is STILL worthwhile to post bug reports. At minimum, other people can google them and find that they also have the problem. As for your original question, if your bug reports contain a patch THEN you've done a reasonable amount of work, at least by my definition of "reasonable". Your definition might differ. Tim --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
