William Stein wrote:
2010/2/4 Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net>:
ross k wrote:
I know this subject is a contentious one so Ill just make a quick comment...
It would however mean that people that wanted a stable release to install on
a server they can't change every couple of weeks, would chose an X.Y.1, or
an X.Y.2, safe in the knowledge that it should be quite stable, as only bug
fixes were applied.
. . .
Wolfram Research do that too, with their X.Y.Z. A major release was
Mathematica 6. Only bug fixes were applied in 6.0.1 - there was no new
functionality.
Thats how I was deciding to upgrade a few months ago and I guess a
number of people and companies think of versioning like this
(including as you said Mathematica etc).
It is a pretty standard way in software development. But with billions of
tickets merged into 4.3.1 (William's words)
http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/msg/6c42bcd951a9f526
basing your decision on a Sage version number would not be very useful.
I believe Sage is sufficiently mature that is should start being a bit more
like Mathematica, though I'm not suggesting a major release is made on average
every theee years, which is what Mathematica have done. I think its been going
20 years, and is still only at version 7.
As long as I'm involved, Sage is not ever going to have a release
cycle anything like Mathematica. Your wasting your time suggesting
that.
I thought I made it clear I was not suggesting that, when I said:
"though I'm not suggesting a major release is made on average every theee years,
which is what Mathematica have done"
I can't see there being a lot of take up of Sage in commercial companies when
the latest stable release is changing every month or so.
Seriously, can anybody really see Sage ever getting taken up by "a lot
of commercial companies" unless there is a support company in place
like one has with RedHat, Novell, etc.? When there is a company
standing behind supporting Sage, with paying customers, paid
employees, and support contracts, then that company can have releases
like you describe if that is actually what those paying customers
want.
With the very high cost of Mathematica, then I think Sage has a chance of being
used more in commercial companies. Then people will support it on a commercial
basis, like they do with Apache and Wireshark - two other open-source projects.
But even in a university environment, some people want something that does not
change as often. I'm not the first to make this point, and I doubt I'd be the
last. Perhaps asking on sage-support might have given a different view, as that
would more likely to reach users who are not developers.
Anyway, I'm probably wasting my time, so I will not bother.
Dave
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