> > Think about e.g. the planed break up of gen.pyx into elements that make > > sense. > > Sure, but that will happen transparently without any impact to the > user's code.
I am pretty sure it will have an impact on user's code because it is supposed to clean up the mess that is gen.pyx. Maintaining that interface would defeat the purpose of the break up in the first place. On the other hand, maybe that's not what Craig and Robert have in mind anwyay. > > Maintaining bug-by-bug backward compatibility will be a nightmare because > > the file is pretty messy. I'm sure one can do all kind of weird things > > with gen.pyx right now that one shouldn't be able to do. Shall we keep > > this functionality for backward compatibility? > > Probably not. But if someone knowingly or unknowingly abuses and > interface code will break. Can you give an example of what you mean? How do we define that someone 'abuses' a class when it is full of weird stuff (e.g. stuff to make things faster before proper code was written etc.) That kind of stuff has to go because it encourages bad code to be written. > I don't mean this in a negative way, I am truly curious :). I know that > gen.pyx could certainly use a spring cleaning and that in general as > the coverage creeps up we will encounter all kinds of bad code that > has been around for a while and no one has touched it. Sage must also > be made more consistent and in the process we will have to break some > things - this is unavoidable. It would be nice if we had something > like a major version jump to clearly indicate the before and after, > but it seems that this will be hard to accomplish consistently. The major version jump is *exactly* what I've been lobbying for since SD12 :) If we can't manage to pull this one off, then at least we should have a section in the release notes: this and that behavior was changed and might affect your code. Also, if we can we add deprecation warnings (and eventually we kill the code if it causes hassles)? Cheers, Martin -- name: Martin Albrecht _pgp: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99 _otr: 47F43D1A 5D68C36F 468BAEBA 640E8856 D7951CCF _www: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb _jab: martinralbre...@jabber.ccc.de --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
