Hey everyone,
   Two things on that note, I looked over the conventions page and noticed 
some discrepancies, which is now ticket 
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/13791 and I'd appreciate review. 
Second, Andrea, there are many bugs which are not mathematical problems, 
but errors in code/documentation, such as corner cases not checked or not 
robust enough (#11506, #12871, #9129, there are many others).

Best,
Travis


On Sunday, December 2, 2012 10:22:44 AM UTC-8, Volker Braun wrote:
>
> Your starting point should be the developer guide (
> http://www.sagemath.org/doc/developer), not the reference manual. The 
> latter is really for reference. I think the developer manual has a 
> reasonable explanation of the coercion model. A similar treatment of the 
> category framework is sorely lacking, I agree. It would be really great if 
> one of the people who was involved in writing it would step forward and add 
> a similar section to the developer guide.
>
> To further flesh out the developer guide, maybe we should include a 
> careful selection of module docstrings? By that I mean only the first 
> docstring in the module, ignoring all the class/function specific 
> docstrings. Some module docstrings are really written to give a high-level 
> overview and by cherry-picking those. I'm not sure if sphinx lets us 
> currently do that, though.
>
>
>
> On Sunday, December 2, 2012 12:43:49 PM UTC-5, Charles Bouillaguet wrote:
>>
>> Actually, I think I agree with the request of WM Chung. I found myself 
>> longing for a high-level overview of SAGE development. I think it 
>> could be pretty simple, but that it could explain how some things are 
>> organized. For instance : 
>>
>> *) what is the category framework? what purpose does it serve? How 
>> should it (in theory) interact with the rest of the code? 
>>
>> *) What is the rationale behind the class hierarchy? (mathematical 
>> sub-concept?) 
>>
>> *) A pointer to the document somewhere that explains the 
>> coercion/conversion framework. 
>>
>>
>> And now, for something completely different. 
>>
>> I think that the reference manual is very useful, but its linear 
>> structure (a loooooong list of items where it is not obvious where to 
>> find what you are looking for) is a bit baffling for beginners. I come 
>> from the MAGMA community, and I tend to think that the hierarchical 
>> structure of the MAGMA reference manual is a bit easier to navigate 
>> (http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/magma/handbook/). I could try to 
>> propose a patch implementing such a structure if someone thinks its 
>> worth it... 
>>
>> Also, the presence of the category framework in the reference manual 
>> is also a bit confusing. For instance, when I was new to SAGE, I 
>> wanted to write something that manipulated vector spaces. I thus 
>> browsed the reference manual, and naturally found the "Vector Space" 
>> category... where, of course, I could not find the functions I was 
>> looking for. Why not remove the categories from the reference manual? 
>> What purpose do they serve? 
>>
>>

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