Minh Nguyen wrote: > 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.
I thought part of the problem in this case was that extensive work needed to be done to upgrade our graph theory library to use the new networkx functions, check all of the times we call it, etc. Some of this is probably a lot easier now that Robert Miller has split off the backends into self-contained classes, but we still call Networkx a lot; doing a major upgrade of networkx seems like it would be a nontrivial amount of work. In particular, they redid their design (e.g., splitting out labeled graphs from other types of graphs, etc.), if I recall correctly, which might affect the entire structure of our graph theory functionality. But I haven't tried upgrading, so I'm just speaking from my impressions. I have looked at the new networkx, though. It looks nice. As for the original question, I think that if an spkg can be updated transparently (i.e., no user code needs to change), then the more updates, the better. The spkgs are simple to install, and if you find it is a hassle to keep up with the updates of an optional spkg, then just don't install the updates. Is it not that simple? Thanks, Jason --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
