Hey there, I am very grateful that people put their time into working on the build system, packaging, and these little developer annoyances. After some initial hiccups, it's been a joy to work with meson, not having the docs build all the time is imho the right thing to do, and installing with conda has proved much easier (and at the very least it fails much faster, at least when I am doing the hand-holding.) That's my personal experience and I understand that for others such changes might have been much more annoying.
Personally, I was not too surprised by any of these changes. Maybe because I happened to stumble upon the relevant PRs on GitHub before things were merged. But apparently that didn't work for many other people. I think it's a good idea to announce anything that is likely going to affect developers before it's merged. I don't think this means that everything that affects developers needs a vote but announcing things is a friendly gesture and if people then have doubts that this is the right way forward, we can still call for a vote. On Monday, September 29, 2025 at 11:34:44 PM UTC+3 Nils Bruin wrote: Autocratic rule by just forcing decisions through does not invite buy-in and ultimately will narrow the community; not grow it. I think a friendlier aspect would be to call this do-ocracy but of course I understand what you mean. Ultimately, many open source projects work to some extent like that. The project (by whatever governance) might decide on a direction but if nobody is willing to implement things, then such a decision doesn't really matter. Instead, when somebody is willing to improve things, I think the general attitude should be a supportive one. Of course people should invite buy-in and listen to criticism (and in our system this might ultimately lead to disputed PRs or a vote on sage-devel.) On Monday, September 29, 2025 at 7:12:49 PM UTC+3 John H Palmieri wrote: If someone is working on the build system and neither the author nor the reviewer think to try it out on a fresh git clone, I think it's also fair to call that careless. Others may disagree with me. Yes, I think I do disagree :) I would have expected the automated testing (buildbot) to catch such an issue somehow. I personally think it's too much to ask from a reviewer to try something like this. After all, what would have been thorough? Whether it builds from a git clone & from a tarball & from a previous build on Linux & macOS…then I'd rather not review to be honest. I don't have the changeset in front of me but I think it's a call for the author to make which scenarios to check (and I am sure the author checked some scenarios that they saw most likely affected.) When you make changes on the foundations, stuff breaks, people are sorry, and we move on. That's unfortunate but that's life. I think that's one of the main reasons for CI, i.e., to detect unexpected breakage. julian -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/6bdd56da-918c-4d3c-9045-9ceea239734bn%40googlegroups.com.
