On May 26, 9:13 am, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 12:59 AM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> > wrote: > > Looking at the Sage roadmap > > >http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/roadmap > > > I see Sage 4.4.3 is "A tiny minor release on the way to 5.0" which is > > due on 30th May. > > > Sage 5.0 is due out two days later on first of June. > > > I don't believe such a release strategy says anything positive for > > Sage. In fact, quite the opposite - I think it looks incredibly > > amateurish. Who can take a program serious if two releases are made > > two days apart? > > Sage releases rarely come out on the random day that they happened to > be scheduled for on trac. That day is just some field one fills in > when making the milestone. I wouldn't take it too seriously.
Sage has a mission of creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab. Those are all professionally developed software Randomly scheduled release days is not a very professional approach to software development. IMHO, Sage should have some plan, like Jeremy showed with links to FreeBSD and OpenOffice. That's not to say everyone should give up if deadlines are not met, but at least if milestones are set, people can see where Sage is aiming, If milestones are repeatedly missed, it would suggest that a goal is unrealistic, or will need changes to the approach to make it more realistic. I can't see to find this archived on Google groups, but http://www.mail-archive.com/sage-devel@googlegroups.com/msg04618.html has a comment from Michael Abshoff in August 2007 that: "I guess it isn't a secret that William want Sage 2.8.1 to work on Solaris "out of the box". It took about 2.5 years after that before Sage would build properly and pass the tests on Solaris. Currently to me at least, Sage development looks a bit haphazard. I realise you are a mathematician, but you are the lead developer of an open-source project. You might consider looking at a book on software engineering, as there are a lot of things that can be learned from such book that could be applied to Sage. http://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineering-9th-Ian-Sommerville/dp/0137035152/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275123329&sr=1-4 has quite a good reputation. I've not seen that book, but have an older book on a similar subject by Roger Pressman, though I believe Pressman's more recent books are not so up to date now. > If you want to make a parallel stable version of Sage and release it > that way, go for it. I will do at a later date, if I think you are convinced of the need for a more stable releases and you can convince some others. At the minute, it appears to me my views are in quite a minority and given the problems that caused with Solaris, I'm not so keen to get involved in something else that I can see some of your regular developers would certainly not like. IMHO, producing stable versions should be the primary aim rather than a secondary aim. 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
