I'd be interested in knowing how many people actually use/store pickles and whether this is enough to justify maintaining the pickle jar. Speaking for myself, I never use pickles and the only time that I have ever looked at them is when I was upgrading various classes and this broke some of the old pickles in the pickle jar. (The first time this happened there was almost no documentation on the pickle jar, and how to fix broken pickles, so I wasted a lot of time upgrading the pickles only to be told that this was not sage policy -- and then I wrote the documentation in the manual to hopefully save others grief...)
Part of the reason why the pickles in the pickle jar are updated so rarely is because this is cumbersome to do because the jar is a compressed tar file. The other reason is that, as Volker said, there is no automated process for updating the pickle jar. On #10768 <http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/10768#comment:11> Volker has asked whether we really want the pickle jar to be tracked by the git repo as he estimates this will add about ~10M per year to the repo. On the other hand, I think that the current state of the pickle jar is close to useless because it is so out of date (the pickle are rotting?). I would like to suggest that we either: 1. Maintain the pickle jar properly, by which I mean that the jar is updated regularly (and probably tracked by git). 2. Remove the pickle jar entirely. In principle, having a pickle jar is a good way of ensuring backward compatibility. In practice, if the pickles in the jar are not representative all of the objects in the latest version of sage then the pickle jar is providing us with a false sense of security. If no one is storing old pickles then the pickle jar is not really needed. On these grounds my preference is for option 2. Andrew On Friday, 17 January 2014 03:46:00 UTC+1, Volker Braun wrote: > Any changes are very infrequent and there is no process to update it > regularly: > > $ git log --oneline src/ext/pickle_jar/ > 3d1bf45 Trac #7922: Categories for Weyl character rings and weight rings > 38475a0 Trac #10354: Remove deprecated word objects from the pickle jar > 6dcaf62 4.4.4.alpha1 > 6ce1bde 4.1.2.rc1.alpha3 > 7e586f9 Update the pickle jar for 4.0.alpha0 > 77359f7 Adjust pickle_jar due to removal of extended rationals and > integers (#5735) > d1c28ff Update pickle jar for Sage 3.4 > 20a3237 Remove failing pickles from #4653 > cdaa569 added the first pickle jar. > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
