On Jan 16, 2012 1:45 AM, "Jeroen Demeyer" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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.

Could you put a version of this email in /home/release?

> 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 outdated.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

-- 
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

Reply via email to