Dear All! Given Martin's questions about the doc test failures on the queue and also some discussions I had last week at the Sage Days and by e-mail with Franco, perhaps we need to discuss some issues about the sage-combinat queue.
First of all, the queue is meant for active development of code in the general area of combinatorics. Putting patches there makes it possible to share code that is not yet completely ready to be integrated or still under development. The advantage is that others can see, try out, and test the code early on and also see whether there are other people working on the same files to avoid conflicts. It also makes it easy in principle to share patches with collaborators. This said, the only thing that is currently checked is that the entire queue applies on the most recent versions of sage. It is the intention to run daily tests on the section of the patches in the category "under review" and "merged", but I do not think this is currently done. Since we just received an NSF grant for Sage and William Stein is in the process of buying a new server for sage-combinat using this grant, we might be able to make this happen soon. For the patches lower in the queue, every developer is responsible for their own patch and it can happen that certain patches break tests. Hence, Martin, I do not find it so worrisome that so many tests fail. There are probably some patches below yours which are not yet up to the stage that all tests pass. As many of you must have noticed, the sage-combinat has grown quite a lot! There are many patches which is great. The downside is that there are also some patches which have been sitting there for quite some time without much further development. This makes it hard to maintain the queue when new versions are coming out. It might also make it hard for people with patches lower in the queue, who would like to get their patch into sage and have to commute their patch past patches higher in the queue. So we would like to urge people to actually work on their patches and get them ready to be integrated into main-sage! Here are several *ideas*: * We should run daily tests on the "needs review" section and pop patches off that section if the tests do not pass (or people are not actively working on making them pass). * Everyone should try to get their patches into main-sage in a reasonable time frame or remove their patches from the queue if they are outdated. * Perhaps we should have a second queue for only the patches currently actively developed and in the review or final development process. This queue would only be maintained on the very last version of sage and patches are removed once the next version of sage comes out. This would take the extra constraints off developers to, at the same time, make their patch apply cleanly on a given version of sage and juggle the tail of sage-combinat patches that lie on top of it. This caused quite some frustration to both Franco and Mike and myself last week trying to work on some large patches. Best, Anne -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-combinat-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-combinat-devel?hl=en.
