On Dec 3, 2009, at 5:18 PM, tmb wrote: > I have created a pretty large number of worksheets over the last year > for courses in pattern recognition and image processing. > > Unfortunately, I keep having problems with sage versioning. For > example, I had renamed worksheets to have a more consistent naming > structure, but many of the new names actually have reverted suddenly. > Within individual worksheets, I find that sometimes there are remnants > of output left from previous expressions that have been deleted. I've > also had problems with the notebook seemingly "getting out of sync" > and text randomly appearing or disappearing occasionally. This is > with up-to-date versions of Sage running on the latest Ubuntu 9.10, > and recent versions of Firefox. > > I'm kind of losing trust in the Sage notebook and the Sage server. It > seems like my notebooks are always at risk. I've dealt with buggy > software before, but what's so frustrating about Sage is that there is > nothing I can really do to back things up or version them.
One thing you could do is submit bug reports, especially with reproducible answers. > Even > downloading all the notebooks as a zip file fails with some frequency > and takes forever even if it works, and now I can't even upload the > manual backups I created. Is there any light at the end of the tunnel? I think so. The notebook was recently split out of the Sage library, which may have introduced new bugs, but is probably going to be worked on a lot more this next month as well. Throughout most of its history the notebook has been relatively stable (for me at least). > Are there any new > facilities on the horizon for versioning and copying notebooks? The notebook used to save snapshots very often, with the downside that the worksheet directories got huge. There's definitely the demand to put that in in some form or another. Other bugs may have been introduced with the switch of the notebook to a separate spkg rather than as part of the library itself. > One thing that would help a great deal is if notebooks were actually > stored in a Mercurial repository and versioned using Mercurial. That > way, I could pull/backup copies directly, synchronize Sage > installations, and have a much more reliable record of the history of > the collection of notebooks. We've actually talked about doing this, it would probably not be too hard--the notebook is easily represented as a huge text file. I don't know if mercurial diffs would be any good at trying to "merge" notebook histories, but certainly for going back and forth. - Robert -- To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
