On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 9:22 AM, rjf <[email protected]> wrote: > Maxima's bug list is public.
I was only asking about Maple, Matlab, Magma, and Mathematica. > > While it is, in some ethical universe, a plus to announce/share bugs, > it is, as a > practical matter, much less useful than one might initially believe. Wow, you sound a lot like the Mathematica documentation! "You should realize at the outset that while knowing about the internals of Mathematica may be of intellectual interest, it is usually much less important in practice than you might at first suppose." > I > don't know > what the FoCM audience looks like, or how thoughtful they are. Are > they motivated > to use Linux because there is a bug list? (Is there?) I don't know if "they motivated to use Linux" or not. That's a loaded question. > With a large enough user base consisting of mostly naive users, all > using > a complicated program, a large percentage of reported bugs are simply > not > bugs, but misunderstandings, user errors, or just wrong beliefs of > what > the right answer is. In fact, even expert users sometimes report non- > bugs. With Sage (and definitely Magma), the vast majority of reported bugs are really bugs. > <tangent> I have reported bugs in Microsoft software, and they REFUSED > to accept them, > requiring me first to subscribe to some newsgroup and report it to > other (non-MS people) > who provided such useless suggestions as "reload your operating > system". > I don't know what ever happened to one bug (which was a very specific > issue with text-to-speech processing), since there was an obvious > though clumsy workaround, and I didn't bother to follow it up except > to mention it to someone at MS research. > > > Every so often people report as a bug in maxima/macsyma that > integrate(1/x,x) > should be log(abs(x)) instead of log(x). The bug is probably "you > need to know more mathematics." > > Furthermore, if you find what you think of as a bug, how likely are > you to be able > to match it against the bug that someone else found? Assuming that > you have in fact > found a bug, it may have many distinct manifestations. This is, I > believe, what > Bondarenko's program does. Find one bug and worry it to death. > > It is not clear how a user would truly use a bug list. With Sage, and tens of thousands of other open source programs in the wild, there are users and a bug list, and it is visible how they are used. > Perhaps look > at it before starting his day to see if any of the programs he thought > he might use are broken? (e.g. Oh, I see LU-decomposition may be > broken. Better not use it.) > Or maybe he starts his day by seeing if he can resolve someone else's > bug? (Generous of him, but probably not the way to add to his CV.) Perhaps the person gets an error message, finds it confusing, does a *GOOGLE SEARCH*, finds that message is related to a bug, reads a discussion of the issue, along with its current status, workarounds, etc. I'll wager that this just happened a few tens of thousand times with various software while I wrote this sentence. > There are "quality" metrics that you might try to compute based on the > length of time that bug reports linger (etc). Not clear that this is > very useful, though. That is orthogonal to whether bug reports are publicly available or not. > > > > On Aug 26, 10:30 pm, William Stein <[email protected]> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I'm writing a paper associated to my plenary talk at FoCM 2011 >> Budapest, and I am tempted to make the following statement: "The bug >> tracking done by the developers of all four of the Ma's is secret; >> none of them publish a list of all known bugs, the status of work on >> them, and how bugs are resolved." >> >> Here Ma's = Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab. >> > > How bugs are resolved??? > I think it is fair to say that for each software system, there are > people who look at bug reports and check them out a little (just try > reporting a bug and see what happens). If they deny there is a bug, > they will tell you; if they confirm it, they will tell it to some > developer team which will consider how/when/if to fix it. > > Sometimes I've gotten reports "fixed in the development system. will > be fixed in next version." > > What do you think happens to resolve bugs? > > Frankly, I think having someone paid to look at bug reports has some > distinct advantages over posting alleged bugs on a public list. > > >> ** Question: Is this actually true? ** >> >> I've always thought it was true, but maybe it isn't. If anybody knows >> if *any* of the proprietary Ma's make the list of known bugs public, >> can you let me know? >> >> Oh, if anybody knows why they don't (for the Ma's that don't), I'm >> curious. (I'm not asking for idle speculation, or reasons you make up >> for them not making their lists public.) >> >> I'm going to use the above to segue into mentioning Sage's trac. > > If there are bugs from the Sage community that are really bugs (or > alleged bugs) in Maxima, the appearance of a bug report in Sage's trac > is pretty much irrelevant. If it works the same way with other > subsystems, then it is pretty much irrelevant, unless Maxima > developers are magically informed. > > You can, of course, tell people whatever you want, but I think there > are a few fairly heavy-duty users of Maxima who are likely to attend > FoCM. Whether they will say anything or not, who knows. > > RJF > >> I'll also put a link >> tohttp://cybertester.com/andhttp://maple.bug-list.org/to emphasize that the >> Ma's are definitely >> not bug free. > > Do you really want to lend credence to a collection of bugs that you > cannot vouch for? > Do you know that these bugs are meaningful? My impression is that one > can discover an > expression, say E, such that Maple or Mathematica cannot tell that E > happens to be identically > zero. > Then you can feed some expression involving E into many different > "commands" and have them fail in some way. Thus a simplification > failure (a class of failures that is inevitable from the > undecidability of zero equivalence), can be mapped into a failure of > integration, series expansion, limits, etc etc. > > I assume that not all of VB's bugs are of this nature, but I think > that finding bugs in systems that claim to do "all mathematics" is > like shooting fish in a barrel. > > RJF > > >> >> Thanks! >> William >> >> -- >> William Stein >> Professor of Mathematics >> University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org > > -- > 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 > URL: http://www.sagemath.org > -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- 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 URL: http://www.sagemath.org
