Hi Simon, On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 8:39 AM, Simon King<[email protected]> wrote: > > Dear Sage developers, > > I asked the following question in a mail to William Stein and David > Joyner, but William suggested the discussion should be in public. > > Yesterday my cohomology package became an optional spkg. But there are > a lot of homological algebra constructions that aren't in, yet. > However, some features (e.g. Massey products) might soon be > implementable. I am not sure yet, but end of next week might be > possible. > > Assume that you are expert for a topic X, and there is a spkg about X; > hence, you are a potential reviewer. How soon would you be fed up with > seeing yet another version of the X-spkg? How long (as a rule of > thumb) would you suggest to collect more features before publishing a > new spkg version? > > Sage used to have a "publish early and frequently" policy, but I don't > know if it is appropriate for spkgs as well.
Here I speak from my experience in trying to (unsuccessfully) update the NetworkX spkg to version 0.99. Currently, Sage is shipped with NetworkX 0.36 and I have created ticket #6041 http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/6041 in order to get NetworkX 0.99 into the standard packages repository. Note that NetworkX 0.99 has been around over a year now, and version 1.0 is still in development for about the same amount of time. In this case, we would not be updating NetworkX that often, probably about once or twice a year on average. Where the release dates between two successive stable releases are greater than 3 months apart, or about a year apart, one would expect drastic changes in the API. This is what happened with the changes between NetworkX 0.36 and 0.99. The changes between these two versions break API compatibility between the two versions, and to the credit of the NetworkX developers these changes are well-documented. But with drastic changes, it can be difficult to upgrade an spkg to the newer version. Of course, here "difficult" is understood to mean someone like myself with little experience in updating spkg's, as opposed to reviewing updated spkg's. So on the one hand, I'm rather peeved that my attempt to upgrade to NetworkX 0.99 has been unsuccessful. But on the other hand, it has stimulated me to spend more time debugging the issue. Just my 2-cent. -- Regards Minh Van Nguyen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
