Arthur, Thank you very much for replying and thanks also to Tony Hearn for releasing REDUCE as open source. I believe this is a very positive development for all people interested in computer algebra and I fully expect it also to be a significant benefit to the REDUCE project. At the very least, making REDUCE available as open source will help to ensure that the very great investment in REDUCE by a large number of people over a rather long time (> 30 years?) will not be lost as the new generation researchers interested in computer algebra systems appears.
One thing that I want to mention up front here is that over the last two years during which Sage has been under very active development, I have found that the Sage project and William Stein in particular has been very strongly supportive of other related open source projects. I think the Sage project as a whole is an excellent example of the kind of co-operation and collaboration that one might hope for in an open source project and can serve as a model for other projects to try to follow. If you are looking for advice and suggestions on how to organize the open-reduce project, I have sure that you will receive useful comments from Sage developers. One thing that I think is very important is an active developer email list. So far I have not been able to find such a list for open-reduce. Concerning building open-reduce on Debian 4.0: My comment about test failures was not intended as any sort of criticism, rather the opposite. Yes, I do intend to submit bug reports to the open-reduce project. And I do understand how important bug reports are to any project. I am currently in the process of moving the axiom-wiki server that has been hosted by the Sage project for the last year to a new and more secure virtual server environment also provided by Sage. (Thank you again, William! :-) As you may know, the axiom-wiki web site provides an interface for REDUCE in addition to Axiom, Maxima and Sage. As part of this move I decided to re-build the version of REDUCE used by axiom-wiki from the newly available open source release. Over the next few days I will be testing the new configuration and I will certainly file bug reports for any REDUCE-related problems I find. Regards, Bill Page. On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:51 PM, you wrote: > OK - my reply to you did not go to the general group. If you think > others would like a copy by all means circulate it further. Arthur > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Arthur Norman <a...@cam.ac.uk> > To: Bill Page <bill.p...@newsynthesis.org> > Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 17:49:09 +0000 (GMT Standard Time) > Subject: Re: [sage-devel] Re: reduce > > Indeed Tony Hearn has just released REDUCE under the Modified BSD > license and you can find stuff on Sourceforge. > > A very few comments on Bill Page's thoughts.. > (1) The fact that a copy built on Debian 4 for somebody other than me > is something I view as greatly encouraging - but if the tests then failed > I should ask for bug reports so that it is possible to look into them! > > (2) Since the code has only JUST been released in this way and the > release is based on a recent development snapshot rather on code that > has been tested and stabilised to a proper formal production quality I > rather expect that there will be a mild swamp of bugs that emerge as > people try it, and the community of existing Reduce developers is still > in the process of organising itself to be able to respond to these. So if > we do not fix complicated things at once please have patience! But also > note that from one perspective at least the idea of Open Source is that > when you find bugs you can help propose fixes - more people helping > sort things out will be WELCOME. > > (3) I am certain that the REDUCE people will like to cooperate with > other related groups - but I suspect that right now we need advice > and help getting ourselves stable and running, and complicated initiatives > will want to delay a month until that is done. But that delay does not > indicate lack of willinggness to join in with a Sage interface etc... just > a resource issue. > > (4) When Tony Hearn accepted contributions to Reduce from others he > needed to be able to incorporate those into the commercial version, so > he collected fairly respectable release documentation. There are a couple > of packages where at present sourceforge has just stubs while we check > up on that. The current active developers were asked about their views > about the current code they had in the development tree and given plenty > of opportunity to explain which bits they needed held back from BSD-dom. > > Regards. Arthur > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
