> 1) Have you run the test on unpatched FriCAS? No, why should I?
That sounds probably arrogant, but I would expect that I'm not the only person who ignores unknown errors. > 2) Google for 'polynomial gcd failure due to bad reduction'. Why should that be a way to find out what the bug in FriCAS was? Would it be OK, if I used Yandex or any other search engine. Would it be OK, if I am without internet connection when I want to review the patch? > That > finds literature explaining how similar computations works. Atfer > that it should be clear why the test is of such form. Another paper > is referenced at top of PGCD. > 3) If you know how algorithm is supposed to work, then with reasonable > effort you can go trough code line by line and see what happens. > If you pretend to know nothing about p-adic GCD algorithm, then > the only way for me to explain is to write paper with explanation > of the algorithm. I may do this some day, but it is not easy > task. And there are already written paper giving adequate > background. Waldek, you probably misunderstood my comment. I am not saying that you should write tons of explanations or even a whole paper on the issue. I was just saying that in a commit message that fixes a bug, it must be clearly stated what the bug actually was and how it can be reproduced. A link to the bugtracker would be enough, but better, if it is explicitly in the commit message. Then I expect some hint of why the old code was wrong and why the new code is better. References to the literature that was used to fix the issue would be wonderful. This wish of better commit messages does not only go to you, but is actually a general remark. > 4) The patch is bigger than strictly necessary. But the original > coding was so bad that felt that I need to fix that too. The > first PGCD hunk just fixes coding. The second one is what > matters. If your change actually fixed two issues. A) bad code form and B) fixing the bug, two commits where the first just says "beautify formatting" would have been a better way to address two issues. > 5) Concerning re-checking the patch: if I made an error than > an explanantion could easily bias you to repeat the same > error. That's true, but I'm a mathematician and trust only myself. It's still better to be biased than having to invest an unnecessarily big amount of time to actually figure out the bug (without running any code) if somebody could easily have given quite appropriate links and short explanations about the issue. > 6) Concerning attracting more people to the code: I am not > convinced that a lot of explanations would help. More > precisely, pointing out to paper and code implementing > things decribed in paper can help in getting attention > of people interesed in algorithms. But understanding > of PGCD requires some serious effort. And once > somebody is willing to spend this effort he/she may > get quite far just reading papers and code. If somebody > is stuck at specific problem I would happily discuss > details. But generic reqest of sort "add more explanation" > are of little use. Don't you think we should increase the bus factor of FriCAS? > 7) Sorry if the above sound too harsh. But it looked > like you turned off thinking: PGCD is _randomized_ > (Las Vegas) algorithm and we need several tries to > hit the bug (1000 is a compromise between time to run > the test and probability of hitting the bug). Whether harsh or not, I don't care. And if I am able to think or not, I also don't care. But if you think just from the file https://github.com/fricas/fricas/blob/master/src/input/pgcd.input one can figure out which implementation in what domain is actually tested, then I am not on your side. And repeating a call to gcd 1000 times looks really strange if there is not comment next to it. *You* probably know what this test is connected to. When *I* see that file in one year, I have to go through the history of the commits to find out with what files it was committed together. From that I must guess what the issue was and what and how it was actually fixed. Sorry, but that's just too much effort for me to even consider investing any time. I feel sad that the code seemingly improves, but it already starts rotting at the time it is written. I will probably not change the way you are working, but I'd like to make you aware that when you not only want FriCAS for yourself, you should think about attracting more people, not just users, but also developers. We badly need it. Ralf -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
