On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 1:22 PM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > > Peter Jeremy wrote: >>>>> I think 10 years would be best. Any less than 5 is asking for trouble. >>>>> Sure Sage >>>>> makes a new release every couple of weeks, but as we see from recent >>>>> discussions, not everyone wants to update every couple of weeks. >> >> I think both are unrealistic for a volunteer project. Instead of >> looking at what Sun or Wolfram offer, look at what the large FOSS >> projects offer. Mozilla Firefox is supported for about 6 months after >> the following major release. For FreeBSD, the last version released >> on each major branch is supported for 2 years after release (earlier >> versions are supported for between 1 and 2 years) and deprecated >> functionality will normally be retained for a complete major release >> after the deprecation announcement. > > Sage has a mission of creating a viable alternative to the expensive > mathematical packages. To make a truly viable alternative, it needs to be on > the > same level as Wolfram Research. So, IMHO, we *must* look at what Wolfram > Research do. The fact Sage and Firefox are both free, does not in my opinion > we > should be aiming to be a par with Firefox, but with Mathematica. > > The implications of not getting support on an old version of Firefox is > considerably less of an issue than if your old Sage notebooks stop working. I > believe Wolfram Research support deprecated code for a lot longer than what > you > are suggesting.
How does WRI "support deprecated code"? And for how long? > IMHO, Sage should be aiming to be more like the professional maths package, > not > itunes or Firefox. What are they like? My main experience with deprecation in the Ma's is with Maple and Magma. - Maple -- has an idiotic, confusing and contradictory mix of upper and lowercase linear algebra functionality, because they are too scared to remove deprecated code. Yet still, they definitely do break old code with new Maple versions sometimes. - Magma -- they deprecate and change things at will in the interest of clarity and correctness, with an aim toward converging toward finding the "right" design given their constraints. But this is OK since they have a relatively small and highly technically sophisticated user base. William -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
