On Jan 25, 8:20 am, Martin Albrecht <[email protected]>
wrote:
> > 4.0 was discussed
>
> I think we should agree way in advance when 4.0 is going to be
+1
> and then allow
> ourselves to break backwards compatibility: i.e. go through and remove a
> bunch of cruft (at least the stuff that has a DeprecationWarning).
I don't think it is a good idea at all. Deprecation warnings are the
way to go and I think even six months is too little time to give the
vast silent Sage user base a chance to upgrade. More and more of the
user base does not show up on the list or makes its problems known to
us. The AMS meeting has shown that people are also upgrading much more
slowly than the developers for obvious reasons. Having the deprecated
functionality in tree has a very tiny cost to support IMHO and
breaking people's code should be avoided at all costs. Every time an
Open Source CAS has broken backward compatibility in major way (GAP 3
vs. 4, M vs. M2 - I know that you aren't proposing anything as drastic
like that) a large portion of the user base and more importantly a lot
of code written in the older version was never ported forward. CoCoA 4
has code that you could run Macaulay code and given the less than
stellar speed of CoCoA's interpreter it was a surprise to me that this
feature was in demand. When I worked for the CoCoA team we had
requests to support *8 year* old versions of CoCoA when it was trivial
to get a new version.
We should not go into the same direction as say Maple where a new
major version often promises to break code (even though this is more
embellished than in reality).
> Cheers,
> Martin
Cheers,
Michael
> --
> name: Martin Albrecht
> _pgp:http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99
> _otr: 47F43D1A 5D68C36F 468BAEBA 640E8856 D7951CCF
> _www:http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb
> _jab: [email protected]
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