On Jun 1, 2010, at 4:09 PM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
On 06/ 1/10 11:56 AM, Robert Bradshaw wrote:
On May 29, 2010, at 3:34 AM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
The real question though is why do you think Sage would be better off
with a roadmap? Would we have more users?
Probably not.
Happier users?
Yes.
Would it attract more developers?
It would probably put less off. The random nature of Sage at the moment is
not attractive to developers.
I don't know anyone who's been turned off due to the nature of Sage
development or lack of clear roadmap, but I could see it happening.
Are we suffering due to the lack of a roadmap?
I think we are. I believe that if there were specific dates for feature
freezes, it would be useful to know. I for example have a lot of tickets I
need reviewing, which has become increasing difficult to get done since
sage-solaris was created. Should I try to badger someone to review them
tomorrow, since the release will be made Thursday, or I should not worry,
since no releases will be made soon?
Releases are always going to be made soon, so it's always worth trying to
get a review as soon as possible. (I've got a lot of tickets in that
situation as well, but I've been otherwise occupied lately). The only urgent
ones would be blockers (e.g. something that produces incorrect results) or
occasionally something that's really a pain to rebase.
If Sage has a mission of being a viable alternative to the commercial
products, it should have some roadmap of how it is going to do that. Student
projects could be proposed to address specific areas of weakness.
Yes, it's amazing what students can do.
As you know, there was a full-time employee working on the Solaris port,
yet that was many years late. Had there been specific milestones to reach by
certain dates, it would have been realised that port was slipping badly.
It's more difficult when there is no plan.
Honestly, I don't know if such a plan or milestones would have made a
difference here.
I believe there is far too little time between a release candidate and a
final release - a fact that would be obvious to any professional software
developer if a roadmap was published.
I'd agree with you here.
Would a user download a verion today, if there was a new release scheduled
for tomorrow? He/she would probably wait a day or so.
Or, he would decide to do that, then never come back for a long time. (It's
happened to me.) With frequent releases this is less of an issue.
Or is it more of a PR need?
You may consider it "PR" but I would say it looks more professional than
random dates. I think appearing professional is a good thing if you want to
compete with professional software.
I didn't mean this in the derogatory sense at all--I agree it's important to
be professional.
I think our different views may be age related. It might not be a
coincidence that both Peter Jeremy and myself are quite a bit older than
most Sage developers. Perhaps we see things from a different perspective.
And I sincerely do appreciate another perspective, thank you for
elaborating. It may also be the cathedral vs. the bazaar difference of
perspective. It could also be professional software developers vs.
volunteering mathematicians (and in particular, Sage is developed primarily
by its users, who put in the work to get the features they need and want
them in as soon as possible rather than being directed by external
customers).
In terms of a roadmap, I think it would be extremely valuable to have a list
of features that Sage is clearly lacking to be a viable alternative to the
closed source offerings, perhaps somewhere on the wiki by topic. We need
something higher level than tickets, but lower level than the mission. This
has been done haphazardly for some areas, but doing this systematically
(with a common place to accumulate the results) would be very valuable. This
has and will happen, to some extent, as part of grant proposals and sage
days planning. The combinatorics group is a stellar example of this:
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/wiki/SageCombinatRoadMap . I'm not
convinced that tying things to specific milestones/timelines will be as
realistic given the dynamic nature of the developer base, but setting goals
for specific Sage days, or "big" releases like 5.0 makes a lot of sense.
- Robert
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