On Saturday, April 9, 2016 at 3:24:27 PM UTC+1, William wrote:
>
> On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 2:49 AM, Dima Pasechnik <dim...@gmail.com
> <javascript:>> wrote:
> >> SMC does inform my frustration with the current limitations on Sage
> >> development.
> >
> > I am afraid we see a conflict of interest here.
> > It is in interests of SMC that Sage is very, very stable... Frozen.
>
> I want Sage to be (massively) easier to develop and use. I want Sage
> usage (and development) to grow beyond its relatively small initial
> user group, where it has been stuck since 2010. I think the best
> way forward is to trust users and developers further, and support them
> with better tools to do development, rather than viewing them as not
> worthy of such (" independent fifedoms.... a lot of friction"). My
>
While better tools are great, in effect you propose to create just this,
independent fifedoms,
however nice your modularisation proposal might sound.
How this (does not) work(s) in practice one can see to an extent with GAP,
or with Python.
I already elaborated upon the former; for the latter, here is a concrete
example,
related to Sage (it broke Sage on OSX at some point),
with a pip-installable package, https://cryptography.io.
They only build with Xcode on OSX (and cannot with gcc), or at least it was
the case, see
https://github.com/pyca/cryptography/issues/1924, which obviously broke
Sage support.
And the response was, well, how an independent fifedom would respond to a
request not
on its agenda, with "well, hmm, we'll fix it perhaps some time in the
future in some way, but
we would not even look at your trivial 3-line patch, thanks."
Yet another (Cython) example was provided by Jeroen in this thread.
> whole goal with Sage was to give all users as much flexibility and
> power as possible, not to centralize authority too much (like with
> Magma).
>
> Feedback from users makes it clear they need a stable foundation on
> which to build their work, and that -- as much as we imagine we are
> providing one -- Sage is not, and things really have got worse (see
> Simon King's message). I base this on the feedback in this thread,
> and the endless feedback I get from users, and so on.
>
> My proposal is simple: it would be very valuable to support (both
> culturally and technically) people creating standalone Python packages
> that depend on Sage, developed using current standard open source
> practices, which are at this point in pretty good shape.
>
> That's it.
>
> I will continue to recommend to everybody I talk with about Sage
> development that we switch from our current massive monolithic
> centralized approach toward standard open source practices, as I
> mentioned at the beginning of this thread.
There is no successful computer algebra project (of the scale of Sage, or,
say, 1/5th of Sage)
that follows what I think you call, for some reason, "standard open source
practices", while effectively meaning
projects like pip and npm (as if Linux kernel is not following "standard OS
practices").
Moreover, Sage modularisation attempts in the past have not led to anything
useful.
I'd rather see you being much more concrete and constructive in your
proposal.
Dima
I hope I have more time
> in the future to make this easier for people. I appreciate all the
> feedback in this thread.
>
> -- William
>
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"sage-devel" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
