On 31 March 2010 17:51, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > On Mar 31, 2010, at 5:45 AM, David Kirkby wrote: > > [...] > >> IMHO, if Sage is ever to become a viable alternative to Mathematica, >> Maple, MATLAB and Macsyma, you are going to have to shift the emphasis >> towards more thorough testing before making releases. I can't imagine >> Wolfram Research shipping binaries for platforms without testing them >> first. Of course bugs do occur, and what works on one machine does not >> necessary work on another. But it seems to me a lot of Sage bugs are >> avoidable. >> >> What I personally perceive as a lack of sufficient testing of Sage, >> leaves me questioning myself whether I ever want to use Sage. I've >> used Mathematica on and off for many years, and have come across bugs. >> But never have I come across bugs so easily avoided as I see in Sage. >> >> I'm trying to be constructive here, by pointing out what I believe are >> deficiencies in the current process of releases. > > We all want more testing. I see two options: > > (1) Change lots of other people's behavior. > (2) Set up a large-scale automated build farm. > > Though we have neither right now, I see (2) happening before (1). > > - Robert
I personally see a third option. 3) Drop offical support for any platforms where the current resources do not permit Sage to be tested on it. If a large scale automated build farm is set up, which allows Sage to be checked on a larger number of distributions, then the list of officially supported distributions could be enlarged. Can you see much point in haing offical support for more distributions of Linux than it is practical to Sage test on? 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 To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
