On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 10:48 AM, Dr. David Kirkby<david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > > rjf wrote: >> In that report, William Stein says, >> "A large amount of the symbolic functionality that uses Maxima has >> issues like this, but unfortunately there is basically nothing we can >> do about it, except continue with projects to rewrite the parts of >> Sage that call Maxima so that they don't call Maxima." >> >> Which is clearly untrue. Here is one obvious alternative: You or >> someone else, can look at the (open source) Maxima code and try to fix >> it. >> > > Could you be persuaded to look at the Maxima code, since you have a > background in this area? As you are well aware, I don't.
Yes, that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! > >> As for Bondarenko submitting 100 bugs to WRI and WRI accepting 90 of >> them ... I would expect that they were 90 instances of one or a few >> bugs. > > He seems to find enough genuine ones I think. I agree. I've read the long lists he kindly makes available for anybody to see for free, and learned many interesting things from them, especially because they are very precise, specific, and easy for anybody to replicate. Thanks, Bondarenko. > >> As for working around it, Bondarenko is not interested in work- >> arounds. He is not interested in the result of this computation, which >> was probably artificially generated by randomly clumping together >> stuff. He is interested in finding bugs. > > Vladimir Bondarenko is no doubt more interested in finding bugs with > CAS's than actually using the tools. He is no doubt more interested in > finding bugs in commercial tools that open-source ones, as he is more > likely to generate income from that. > > But the Sage project would be unwise to ignore things he found, whatever > his reasons for finding them might have been. +1 I'll reiterate again that at least I personally really want to know about and list on trac every single bug in Sage, no matter how small or specific. > I'm sure companies like Wolfram Research employ people to just find > bugs, reporting them so others can fix them. Using random data sounds a > logical way to me - I've used that technique for testing code I've > written - totally unrelated to CAS's I would add. > > I have little interest in how CASs work myself. I just want to use them > as a tool. Since Sage does not run on Solaris properly, I'd like to see > that change. > > I don't agree with how Vladimir reports his bugs. I've had my > 'differences' with him over the years, He is indeed quite a character. > but he is no idiot and if he has found a bug, it should be fixed if possible. +1 > > Dave. > > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
