On Mar 5, 2010, at 7:56 PM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
Nick Alexander wrote:
David is trying to argue that the goals for Sage-5.0 should be
* Official Solaris 10 support (all tests pass)
TARGET DATE: Sometime in March?
*instead* of the following:
* 90% doctest coverage score (=write about 1500 doctests)
* Official Solaris 10 support (all tests pass)
* Official Cygwin support (all tests pass)
* Close _all_ tickets listed at
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/wiki/stab1
TARGET DATE: Sometime in May.
I vote -1 to this. As a user, I expect a major release (defined as
a version number bump) to include exciting new toys. Solaris
support does not *in my opinion* qualify as an exciting new toy. I
anticipate a Slashdot story announcing the new release, followed by
a surge of interest and downloads. It is *my opinion* that Solaris
support is not an exciting new feature that the resulting publicity
should be promoting. If anything, it is *my opinion* that Cygwin
support is much more likely to appeal to these potential new users,
and would warrant the publicity.
Nick
PS. Emphasis added because I do not want to fan any flames --
please respond accordingly.
Part of my logic for this is that given Sun have
* Donated hardware (t2) worth around $30,000 - $40,000 for this,
* Have supplied other hardware heavily discounted. (sage.math and
most of the disks are I believe Suns)
* Are asking William for a release where they can point customers at,
then those that supplied a lot of money probably do consider it
quite important. You personally might not, but a major investor does.
If Sun (now Oracle) did not consider it important, I doubt they
would have supplied the hardware, and I doubt they would be asking
William questions about the Solaris port.
Don't get me wrong, some people will be very excited about the Solaris
port. However, I bet at least 90% of users couldn't care less. If
release numbers have anything to do with marketing, making this the
only goal is not a good idea.
The only person paid full time to work on Sage was paid to do the
Solaris port.
That is a gross simplification of the history here.
A lot of time, effort and money has gone into it.
The same could be said about many, many components of Sage.
I agree with you about Cygwin too.
I also think reaching a specific level of doc tests is a bit
irrelevant in determining when to increment the major release
number. Perhaps if the doc tests reached 100%, then I might agree.
These are all goals for 5.0, not necessarily what's going to be new in
5.0. I agree that 90% doctest coverage is not something that *makes* a
release, but it's a good thing to shoot for by a certain point in
time. And if (when) any of the above goals are accomplished early (and
I expect some of them to be so, including Solaris) we're not going to
be holding them out of the 4.x series.
I think with the very fast release cycle of Sage, no one release is
likely to have many exciting new toys.
Isn't it great--we get new, shiny toys all year round :)
- Robert
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