William Stein wrote:
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!"
Marketing comes into play a lot here. I think there were good reasons, because
10.5 was highly criticised as buggy.
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 agree.
(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
would be nice if the 5.0 goal list was similarly comprehensible. How
about:
1. 85% doctest coverage score
2. Official Solaris 10 support
Could full Solaris support for Sage not be sufficient for a 5.0 release, without
the other requirements? A build on a new platform would be a reason for a major
release. As would it be when the Cygwin port is working.
If so, 5.0 could be out very soon indeed, as I can now build Sage with every
doctest passing (including all the long ones).
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
Personaly I don't find that too excessive for a large tool. How long does Gimp
take to start?
Dtrace might be a very useful tool to find out what is using the time up. Dtrace
was developed by Sun, but Apple use it on OS X. I believe Apple have wrapped it
in a GUI called 'Instruments'.
It was using dtrace that I realised that Sage constantly calling 'top' was
bringing my system to its knees. The load average was huge, but no processes
appeared to be running.
'top' is called in an infinite loop, as you can see at:
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/attachment/ticket/8391/top-to-prstat.patch
If 'top' is not installed, so the Sage library just keeps calling it until the
doctest times out. It's next to impossible to see that sort of thing with ps or
top.
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
