On Jun 14, 5:00 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 8:43 AM, Marky Marc<marcahr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> > The two machines listed in the subject line seem to be running
> > different versions of sage, viz. "4.0.1" and "4.0.rc0" respectively.
>
> They are both running sage version 4.0.1. The notebook sever on
> alpha.sagenb.org is still 4.0.rc0, but the actual version of Sage you
> get when you run it is 4.0.1. When I restart alpha.sagenb.org, it'll
> be 4.0.1. You can see what version of Sage is being run by typing
> "version()".
>
> > Does the "alpha" machine run alpha versions of the software?
>
> Sometimes.
>
> > Or is it a DEC alpha?
>
> No. You could also tell this is not the case by typing, e.g.,
> os.system("uname -a") into a worksheet cell in alpha.sagenb.org.
>
Indeed, I could have and thus should have endevoured to find these
things out for myself.
> > How do the versions of sage on these machines reconcile
> > with with the term "alpha"?
>
> alpha refers to "alpha version", as in an "alpha version of the software".
> The *only* place that I've ever seen link to alpha.sagenb.org is a link from
> sagemath.org that says "[test version]" in the link title, so I'm curious why
> you don't know the answers to your questions above already, based on that.
>
Yes, that's where I got the link from, and it does say "testing".
Sorry, I guess I'm too tentative when posting to lists like these,
lest I make false assumptions or throw around unfounded accusations,
rather than getting straight to the point.
> > Given that there are serious problems with "exp(.)" functions in
> > v4.0.1 (http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/6256), wouldn't it
> > be better to run a trusted version of sage onwww.sagenb.org?
> > Projects like sage are great and the people who work on them do
> > admirable work. Without users being able to trust the answers returned
> > by sage, though, the software becomes somewhat impractical. This trust
> > is hugely important. Is it possible to takewww.sagenb.orgback to a
> > trusted version?
>
> But #6256 will be fixed in sage-4.0.2, which will be released within
> the next 3-4 days. In the meantime, you can use any previous version
> of Sage that you want by downloading it fromhttp://sagemath.org/src/.
>
> -- William
The main purpose of my email was to make a point about "trusting" the
answers being crucial to the sage project. After sending the email I
realised another viewpoint: if you stuck to a "safe" version of sage
on sagenb.org, few people would use the alpha server and you'd lose a
great opportunity to find bugs in the latest releases, which is a pay-
off for providing the computational resources of sagenb.org.
Thanks for all the hard work.
Ciao,
Marc
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
sage-support-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support
URLs: http://www.sagemath.org
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
