It is clear that new upstream packages are going to be frequently released. Sometimes upgrading the .spkg in Sage causes problems, so the upgrade is put off. This was the case with Maxima I believe. But eventually Maxima was upgraded, and that upgrade caused numerous issues that needed resolving.
Something recently I tried to upgrade to try to fix a problem, failed to fix that, but created more problems, so I did not bother upgrading. So clearly there can be downsides to upgrading packages in Sage. But there is a problem if we do not upgrade with a reasonable frequency. If we eventually do upgrade, the changes in the upstream code are likely to have been very significant, which makes the upgrade harder. It seems to me there needs to be a web page. trac item, online diary ... or similar, which records when a package in Sage was last updated to the upstream release. Perhaps the maintainer(s) of a package get a reminder after 6 months if they have not uodated. Perhaps after a year, an announcement is made on sage-devel that package foobar has not been updated for a year. I believe it is a good idea to avoid the situation which happened with Maxima, when the Maxima version in Sage gets so out of date, that updating was not a simple affair, but requires a huge effort. I do not claim to know the best way to achieve this, but I believe we want some automated mathod that automatically highlights packages which have not been updated to the latest upstream release for an excessive period of time. One possible way of automating this might be to use 'find' to look at the modification times of the 'src'; directory in packages. Then use to that to highlight any that are more than a year old. Dave -- 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
