I think it's time for me to talk about *development versions* of Sage which are under construction and *not released* yet. With development versions I mean beta's (which used to be called alpha's), rc's and (trivially) stable versions.
There are 3 ways to determine the latest *released* development version: * Look at the *sage-release* mailing list (or its archives). The release of a development version will always be announced there: http://groups.google.com/group/sage-release * Look at the development version *download page*: http://www.sagemath.org/download-latest.html This can be accessed from the "Download/Development Release" menu on http://www.sagemath.org/ * Find the latest version without *README.FIRST* file in http://boxen.math.washington.edu/home/release/ You can find the non-released versions also in http://boxen.math.washington.edu/home/release/ but they would always have a README.FIRST file. The main reason I put them there is to be *open* about release management. Everybody can see what I'm trying, which tickets I am merging. You can look at the file *tickets.html* to see a list of tickets *successfully merged* in a Sage release, for example http://boxen.math.washington.edu/home/release/sage-5.0.beta1/tickets.html "Successfully merged" means that all patches apply, Sage builds from scratch, the documentation builds without warnings/errors, ptest and ptestlong pass all tests, building an sdist and bdist works. Such patches might still have known or unknown bugs on other systems, or bugs not caught by doctesting. It's important to understand that the list of merged tickets *varies often*. The sage-5.0.beta1 you download today will likely be different from the sage-5.0.beta1 somebody else downloaded yesterday. Therefore, it's *pointless to report bugs* for these versions (unless you track down yourself what caused the bug). Also, sometimes I merge tickets which have known bugs, for example to test the interaction with other tickets or to test a possible fix. The next important question is: on which Sage version should I base my patches, to what should I *rebase*? The most wrong answer is: the latest stable Sage release (currently sage-4.7.2) because that might be outdated. Using the *latest released* development version is good. Even better would be to look at the latest non-released version, rebase your patch to that but then: find out whether it *applies* to the most recent released version. If not, find out with which patch it conflicts and add that patch to the list of *dependencies* of the ticket. You cannot expect reviewers to use a non-released version and (as said before), non-released versions might change. Regarding this discussion, the *unofficial prealpha* releases that I have been making recently should be treated like non-released versions. The only difference is these prealphas are stable (won't change after being announced). They might still contain non-reviewed tickets or even known bugs. Hope this clarifies some things, Jeroen. -- 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
