On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 2:35 AM, Andrew <andrew.mat...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 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 jar is close to useless because it is so out of date (the pickle are 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?).
The pickle jar should rarely modified, and occasionally get added to. Everything in the pickle jar is still fresh, otherwise tests wouldn't pass. > I would like to suggest that we either: > > Maintain the pickle jar properly, by which I mean that the jar is updated > regularly (and probably tracked by git). > Remove the pickle jar entirely. The whole point of the pickle jar is to maintain stability of serialized formats. We don't want to be constantly updating it. > 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. The pickle jar does not have to be representative of all the objects in Sage to be useful. In fact, in my mind the most important objects are the basic ones (integers, polynomials, matrices), and those are represented. So I'd vote for keeping the pickle jar (perhaps as a directory rather than a monolithic binary blob) and also making it easy to add items to it (but with strong warnings about removing anything). This is like saying we don't have enough tests, so they're providing a false sense of security and we should throw out the ones we have. - Robert -- 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.
