David, I tried 10 times to give an answer to your message, but none managed to stay very calm after the 5th line. I still have great hopes for the following attempt.
First, I remember having said once on this mailing list -- but perhaps it was not to you and in this case I do not mind saying it again -- that I mostly disliked to be criticized (for loss of a better word) by people who hided behind "the developper", "the programmer", or any name they could find other than mine when they obviously perfectly know who they are talking about. If they absolutely have to do it, though, I like to be added as a recipient of the message, and not to find this out by pure luck on this google group. If by any miracle you still ignored that I wrote this (very poor -- let me add it for you) interface and all the functions of Sage that use Cliquer, you will find my name under the "SPKG Maintainer" field of the SPKG.txt file you made me modify not so long ago, which may be enough to drop me a line when you are asking whether the package should be removed. So. Now, more practically : > I've looked briefly at what is supposed to be the unmodified Cliquer code, but > there are endless modifications to the upstream source code. What do you call endless ? 4 functions at the beginning of cl.c, which all begin by sage_* (and are imported in cliquer.pxd) ? It has been one year since I wrote that and I was learning both Cython and how to contribute to Sage at that time, but I would be glad to answer any question you could have on this respect. > Those modifications look very dubious too. For example, there are endless > calls > to malloc, but the programmer has not bothered to check if the calls to malloc > fails or not. Those modifications are in sections specific to Sage, but there > are similar examples in the upstream source code too. > > The upstream source code does NOT create a shared library at all, so the > *Sage* > developer that has messed around to create a shared library has screwed up. > > Perhaps it's just me, but when I see code where people can't be bothered to > check if malloc fails or not, I suspect they have not taken much care > elsewhere > too. I suspect the researcher who first wrote this algorithm spent quite a lot of time thinking about it (weeks, months ? no idea !), to finally find an efficient one, and take the time to implement it, and eventually to use it... In any case I advise you not to judge the work of a man according to how he deals with his "malloc". Which lead us to the following question : > Do we really need Cliquer in Sage? This is the most difficult part of this email. Peace. Dear David, I think we indeed need Cliquer in Sage. It computes maximum cliques, which is a hard job. It does it well. It is actually used in many methods already, and I was thinking of letting yet other methods work on algorithm based on the computation of maximum cliques to make them even faster. If you have really thought about what you ask, with what do you intend to replace the features such a removal would create ? Do you mean that we should just remove all the methods based on them or multiply their runtime by 100 in the best case ? Surely you are not just asking to remove a package regardless of what it is used for, just because you think Sage must be supported on another of your computers ? Please, count my answer as a -1. I think Cliquer is a nice addition in Sage's Graph Library. Now David, please consider the amount of time you have spent on this solaris support. Think of the work you required others to do because of this ( the "Has this been tested on Solaris" messages you posted on most TRAC tickets for instance). Think about all that had to be rewritten because of that, think about the time some patches have required just because of this platform, about -- the very fact that you are today asking to REMOVE FEATURES from Sage because of Solaris. This is mad. I don't even know who is using Solaris. I asked a friend who answered immediately : OpenSolaris has been dead since Oracle bought it. What's the point ? Nathann -- 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
