Hi Andrew, On 2014-01-17, Andrew <andrew.mat...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
Do you suggest to "update the pickle jar" in the sense of "whenever someone implements a new data structure or changes an existing data structure, then an example of the new/changed data structure should be *added* to the pickle jar? Or do you suggest to "update the pickle jar" in the sense of "remove old pickles and *replace* them by new ones"? > If no one is > storing old pickles then the pickle jar is not really needed. On these > grounds my preference is for option 2. You can't know what data people may have stored on their hard disk drive. So, to be on the safe side, we *must* assume that some user has created some database in the good (?) old sage-2.x times. We should aim at keeping these data unpicklable. As it was pointed out in another answer, a pragmatic approach would be to have a focus on "basic", "ubiquitous" data structures unpicklable (such as integers, rationals and so on). But I think it is absolutely not acceptable to say: "OK, let's remove the pickle jar and keep going until some angry user tells us that his seminal 2008 work that took him 10 months of computation time can not be accessed with the latest version of Sage." Best regards, Simon -- 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.
