On Thu, 23 Apr 2009, mabshoff wrote:
> Well, we can try. But the whole point is that is someone posts a pari-
> svn.spkg which fixes bugs in functions Sage does not use and adds
> functionality that is asked for by people no one will be willing to
> wait 3 or 6 months to merge that. It might be more feasible to just
> package Sage before that change and then hope in the next couple
> months upstream will release.
Right, I'm not suggesting Sage wait 3-6 months to merge exciting new code,
but instead that one try to get upstream to agree to do a release with
those features prior to the next one fo these stable releases.
> Well, you pushed patches upstream that contain GNUisms and I will end
> up patching it out of the sources again, so I am not too happy about
> that since upstream way too often does not understand that GNUisms are
> bad or are totally unaware of the problem in the first place.
Yes, there were a few early versions of patches to add shared library
support written by Francois Bissey and myself that were merged by various
upstream library maintainers and did have GNUisms. In more recent work,
I've been encouraging upstream library maintainers to use libtool when
adding shared library support.
NTL is one example of a piece of software that is now doing this. I
believe NTL 5.5 supports building a shared library with non-GNU make.
If you have any problems with how NTL's shared library support was added,
please let me know, as I'm thinking about sending patches replacing the
early shared library support that has GNUisms with using libtool.
> I don't know of any patch but the NTL one where this could be the
> case. We have contacted Victor Shoup several times to speak or visit a
> Sage days and he has *never* responded. The author of that patch works
> at NYU, i.e. the same place as Victor and if he never got around to
> get the patch merged than I can hardly call that our fault.
As I understand it, David Harvey isn't physically at NYU yet and nobody
had mentioned the patch to Victor prior to my sending it to Victor.
> Another author we have contacted via numerous people as well as
> multiple times is the cddlib author and he has also *never* responded
> to us.
The cddlib maintainer has responded to me three or four times, though
generally very slowly. But a Fedora guy was unsuccessful in contacting
him and ended up emailing me asking how to reach him.
> I consider this completely wrong. Can you mention some concrete
> examples?
The ones that caused trouble for me are the NTL patch and the NullspaceMP
function added to iml.
It sounds like you are planning to work to avoid these types of problems
in the future, which is all that's important to me here.
-Tim Abbott
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
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
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
