On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 6:07 PM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > 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.
Indeed. And still do. As you'll see from that other email I posted, in some cases the new Maxima has some *massive* performance issues on startup due to stat'ing files it has no business looking at. (I've got several useful emails from Maxima dev's about how to maybe fix the problem, though.) > 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. Good idea. Maybe we can look at what Linux distros such as Ubuntu do? > 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 Maxima, when the Maxima version in Sage gets so out of date, that 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. You're right that it is better to upgrade frequently rather than waiting a long time, since all the small upgrades are (much) easier than a big one. > 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. +1 > 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. We could also write a script that scrapes webpages and determines the latest released version of each package in Sage. Then it could post once a week (or whatever) to the Sage list with a list of out-of-date packages along with the name of the official maintainer. I think David Joyner and Timothy Clemans used to do this at various points. However, the job is way too big now, since Sage has grown so much. Anyway, I applaud your suggestion to develop tools to better stay aware of this problem. -- William -- 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
