On 26 November 2012 17:19, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Raising the bar on Sage code quality creates this limbo area of code > that's good enough to be shared/built upon, but not good enough to be > included in Sage. The combinat folks seem to have realized this from > the beginning (hence the combinat queue) and this was also the > motivation for psage http://purple.sagemath.org/goals.html (see > especially "Change the development model") I don't see this changing > anytime soon. > > On the other hand, it's very important that code like this not get > lost, and there is value added by taking code to the next level (e.g. > http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2011/12/when-using-sage-to-support-research.html I feel the way to solve this is to have community contributed packages, which don't form part of the core of Sage, but can be installed by anyone if they wish to. Projects like R, Perl, autoconf all have this. I've never looked at the R system, but I know R has a policy of keeping the core quite small. Perl has a huge range of user-contributed packages, which are easy to search and easy to install. http://search.cpan.org/ Just to cut and past the sections, (which has lost the alphabetical order, which I can't be bothered to sort out). * Archiving Compression Conversion * File Name Systems Locking * Option Parameter Config Processing * Bundles (and SDKs) * Graphics * Perl6 * Commercial Software Interfaces * Internationalization Locale Pragmas * Control Flow Utilities * Language Extensions * Security * Data and Data Types * Language Interfaces * Server Daemon Utilities * Database Interfaces * Mail and Usenet News * String Language Text Processing * Development Support * Miscellaneous User Interfaces * Documentation * Networking Devices IPC * World Wide Web * File Handle Input/Output * Operating System Interfaces One would need a way to search for modules, like Perl have. I just done a search for Mathematica, and sure enough, someone has written a Perl interface to Mathematica. http://search.cpan.org/~jberger/Math-Mathematica-0.002/lib/Math/Mathematica.pm Doing a search on "Prime" gives 262 packages. At least the first dozen or so are all related to prime numbers - I did not bother looking at them all. You can also search by author. So if you have a research area of maths, you could look for packages contributed by authors who are active in your field of reserach. To me that is a FAR better way forwared that just adding more and more to the core of Sage. Obviously there would need to be a way for users to get packages added Given the amount of spam, it would be sensible to not leave that open, but allow any Sage developer to add a package. If someone who is not reallly a developer, but feels they have something useful, they could just drop in an email to sage-support and ask that their package is uploaded. It *might* also be worth allowing a method for others to add comments on the packages, but again spam would probably make that impracticle. Dave -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
