Hi, On Tue, Nov 04, 2014 at 08:15:32AM -0500, Jason Grout wrote: > > I agree with both of you. Given that a significant part of this > article dwelt on the closed-source bug-reporting frustration, it > might be even more interesting if the user was taken through an > actual bug found in Sage, and the bug-reporting and bug-fixing > process was described, emphasizing the open approach and the role > the authors could play.
May i witness that claiming "Sage has bugs" in an oral presentation about Sage usually has a good impact. Not hiding problems is an important feature of free software and it is important to advocate it. Four years ago, i was asked to present Sage during a workshop about analytic combinatorics. This community really feels locked with Maple (on which their historical code depends) since most bug they report are not fixed (and they can not fix themselves). I wanted to show the resolution of a problem i had for my own research http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/10063 but during the presentation i wanted to show a simple integral, so i picked a random one which turned out to be clearly false http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/10923 this was somehow even greater since now when i meet someone from there, i can show how it has been fixed (especially in this case it was about discussing with upstream, thanks to kcrisman). They are still Maple-addict but we are working on that ;) More recently, i gave a talk about Sage in a lab where some people are working on braid groups. In the train, i was preparing a slide about that and fell into the bug which is now http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/16059 Instead of avoiding it, i showed how the Cayley graph was looking like a tree, and discussed about bug reporting. Now the bug is fixed and it is clear that i will introduce my forthcoming seminar (not about Sage) there by showing the progress made on this (as well as the remaining problem about general groups defined with relations that still have inconsistent hash functions). So, do not fear with improvising computations during demos, the blue screen of death is a good way to ask for help in the assembly, speak about free software, and so on, we are not just selling a product. Ciao, Thierry -- 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/d/optout.
