Dear Sage-developer,
I'm writing to get an impression on the communities opinion on how citation
management should be implemented. As a background, I should say that I
have taken it into my head to modernize citation management in Sage. I
personally find this very important, as it signalized respect to projects
we wrap. More objectively, I figure such facilities can be a certain plus
when writing the European Sage grant, as many such projects (Pari, Gap,
Singular, FLINT, etc.) are developed in Europe.
Current status in Sage
======================
Mike Hansen implemented citation facilities in sage.misc.citations. This
is all we have.
sage: from sage.misc.citation import get_systems
sage: get_systems("integrate(x^2,x,0,1)")
['ginac', 'Maxima']
His implementation uses profiling:
1) run the given code under control of the profiler.
2) parse the list of functions called, extracting the list of modules
called. For example, sage.libs.pari.
3) Match this list against a certain list of projects, given in
sage/misc/citation.pyx
Problems with the current implementation
========================================
I'm not trying to put Mike's code down. Actually, I'm really glade he
implemented what we currently have. I'm just saying where we can improve
1) Use of profiling implies that the code runs much slower. Tracing
citations for a toy computation may result in failure to pick the right
ones.
2) For technical reasons, we miss functions written in Cython.
3) The subsystems themselves don't tell the user how to cite them.
4) The user is not being made aware of current functionality.
5) The naming scheme could be improved. The interface is not user friendly.
Two solutions available
=======================
We have three tickets dealing with. At #3317, there is old code by Niels
Ranosch, Michael Brickenstein, Burcin Erocal. It tries to take a
completely different approach. At #16777 and #16854, I have provided
improved versions of the current method.
The issue
=========
Burcin has correctly argued at #16854 that the profiling approach is not
capable of tracking decision trees inside a function. I.e., if a function
decides according to some parameter to either call Pari or FLINT, we can't
see this in the profiling.
On the other hand, #3317 uses decorators, which have to be applied to every
function that requires citation management. Alternatively, one can achieve
the same by calling a certain function. In any event, this means there
will be a slight slow down of Sage in general.
Implementation at #3317 is really fast already, but not optimal. If we go
for the decorators approach, I would speed it up.
Question
========
So, what does the community think. Should we prefer the profiling or the
decorator approach? I'm calling for a vote, because I plan to get this
into Sage until, say, the end of this year.
Best,
Martin
PS: My personal vote is +1 decorators
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