Robert Bradshaw wrote:
On Jan 27, 2010, at 11:24 AM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
It does not seem unreasonable to check ones patches on Solaris, OS X
and one linux distro.
I would say that this is unreasonable. Especially for casual or
first-time contributors. But we've had this discussion before. Long
term, the solution is to automate; there was some talk about and even
some works towards this at the last Sage days.
I can see the point for someone contributing their first few contributions. But
personally I don't think it is unreasonable that people are aware Sage is a
multi-platform and that things need to work on all Supported platforms.
I've not seen any comments from William here about the policy with respect to
Solaris.
I agree a build farm is the best solution. I was a member of the wireshark
developer group at one time, as I was expecting to need to devlop that for some
commerical contract, which never came off. But I was *very* impressed with how
their build farm worked.
Basically CVS or similar was used, so developers would upload changes to a
central server. The build farm would build the software on multiple platforms,
and send an email of any breakages to developers. The email also listed those
who had made commits since the last successful build. VERY impressive.
Unfortunately, 't2' would be a bottleneck on any such process due to it's dismal
performance.
Solaris 10 on x86 could be installed in Virtualbox, but I don't know
how well Sage would work on that. My guess is there would be some
issues which would need resolving.
I'm sure that having any Solaris, even a virtualized x86 one, as part of
the existing build farm setup would be a step forward. You're probably
right about there being outstanding issues.
Yes. Solaris 10 on x86 would probably be the best. Open Solaris is quite
different. However, I suspect there are lots of bits of code in Sage that assume
Solaris=SPARC.
Better still would be a fast SPARC, like an M3000. It looks like the buyout of
Sun by Oracle has taken place finally, as the URL to that machine is no longer
on www.sun.com.
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc-enterprise/031588.htm
That's probably around $20,000 for a quad core 2.75 GHz.
The biggest problem seems to be to the Sage library. That's mainly
where there needs to be more testing on Solaris. The individual .spkg
files seem to present less problem.
I find this surprising--most of the Sage library is pure Python (which
should be platform independent, and most of the dependance is in stuff
like / vs \ for paths which is only an issue for Windows porting), or
Cython (which again should be platform independent for most of the code
(please file bugs if its not), and over half of the modules don't link
against anything but math and gmp). Of course, there are probably some
nasty surprises in there as well (libsingular always seems a bear to
port...)
Maybe I jumped the gun a bit there. The long-standing issue was with the
library, but in the use of SCons for building. That used to pick the GNU C
compiler 'gcc' to build C files, then switch to the Sun C++ compiler 'CC' to
build C++ files.
The recent issue with the gcc compiler bug was seen in the library.
This issue is only with the library.
But I guess three things are not a huge number, considering the other issues we
have had. So I retract that statement! It probably seems that way to me, all the
issues since 4.2 have been in some way related to the library - everything else
works.
Fair enough. I'll write something on that. But it would be good if I
had a release that I can tell people to build - currently there is no
way to get a successful build on t2 unless I disable the Sun
compilers. But the fix for that is in trac
Of course it's a chicken and egg problem--until one can just unpack the
sources and type make fewer people will bother to test on that platform.
Yes, which is why I think a 4.3.0.1 release is desirable.
There are several reasons I feel a 4.3.0.1 would be desirable.
Or would that be 4.3.1.1?
No, since it would have to be based on the 4.3 sources, not the 4.3.1 sources.
4.3 plus one single patch would do it.
Dave
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