On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 2:42 PM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote:
> On 2 March 2010 19:01, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>> Just a thought, would knocking out this important list of bugs be a good
>> goal for Sage 5.0?
>>
>> - Robert
>
> It is certainly unusual the way Sage version numbers go. In just about
> any other software project Assuming the version is of the form X.Y.Z,
>
> X is incremented if there is major new functionality
> Y is incremented if there is added, but less major functionality
> Z is incremented when bug fixes are made.
>
> I think someone might be a bit disappointed if they update Sage to
> 5.0.0, without seeing some tangible new functionality.
I'll give disappointed customers a full money-back refund.
By the way, OS X 10.6 was a major new release of OS X, and the big
claim that Jobs made when announcing it was: "no new features!" It
was all about optimization all over the place, better 64-bit support
under the hood, etc. My impression is that this sort of "quality
improvement under the hood" -- not necessarily new features -- is
something a lot of users really, really value, especially in free
software.
> (I did think of requesting it was called 5.0 when the Solaris port was
> finished, but guess that would not be too popular!)
What's wrong with that goal? It was one of the main goals for
Sage-4.0, after all :-). The goals for Sage-4.0 were something like:
* 75% doctest coverage
* OS X 64-bit port
* Solaris 10 support
* Switch from maxima to Pynac for symbolics.
The above goals were I think great motivation for sage-4.0, and really
helped focus and drive development.
So again, I don't think Solaris 10 support being a goal for 5.0 is at
all unreasonable. And now are chances of success are even high, due
to all the hard work everybody has done.
One worry about that laundry list being the goals for 5.0 is that it
is too complicated and hard to remember. It's pretty cool that I can
so easily just remember what the goal list was for sage-4.0. It
would be nice if the 5.0 goal list was similarly comprehensible. How
about:
1. 85% doctest coverage score
2. Official Solaris 10 support
3. Build with SAGE_CHECK=yes works on all platforms, *and* every
package has at least some spkg-check in it, that checks something.
4. Greatly improve the Sage startup time. This needs to be made
precise, e.g., the following should take < 0.5 seconds when run
repeatedly from a scratch disk on sage.math:
time sage -c "print factor(2010)"
Right now it takes over 1.5 seconds every time.
wst...@sage:~$ time sage -c "print factor(2010)"
2 * 3 * 5 * 67
real 0m1.535s
user 0m1.140s
sys 0m0.460s
The above spreads the goals around nicely. 1 is about user
documentation and better library testing. 2 is about better platform
support. 3 is about better quality in our build system, and will pay
many rewards later as we upgrade packages (finding bugs as early as
possible in the build cycle), and 4 is something every single user
will really notice. Note that 4 is probably quite a lot of work all
over the place, and its difficulty is not to be underestimated.
Thoughts about goals 1-4 above? Are they something you could remember
a year from now?
William
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