On Jun 7, 2010, at 7:46 AM, Mike Witt wrote:
On 06/06/2010 10:43:38 PM, Rob Beezer wrote:
On Jun 6, 9:05 am, Mike Witt <[email protected]> wrote:
> This does kind of reinforce the concept, which I guess I've
> heard expressed before here, that you have to be prepared
> to update your sage build very frequently in order to keep
> up with things.
Exactly. ;-) But with
sage -upgrade
at a system prompt, it couldn't be much easier.
Rob
Well, getting a new version is no problem (assuming it builds on one's
system). But since there is no distinction between "bug fix" releases
and releases in which the interface to some function might change
(such as
the change we were just discussing) you never know when downloading a
new version is going to cause you some work figuring out how to update
existing code.
We have a deprecation policy, so at the very least your old code
should work for a while (with warnings) before breaking completely. Of
course that's the theory, some people are better at following it than
others.
Again, I may be an atypical user. I like to have a stable system. I
only
install every *other* fedora release :-)
I have the distinct impression that most of the people here are active
developers, who spend time every day reading the mailing lists,
looking
at the code, and keeping track of the status of bugs, etc. I'm
actually
the guy who is trying to use Sage as "a viable free open source
alternative
to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab" :-)
But, note that I'm not asking for my money back ...
In your case, what I'd do is read the release notes when it comes out,
and decide to upgrade based on that. You don't have to upgrade unless
it fixes bugs or adds features you need.
sage -upgrade has always worked for me (and I've been using Sage since
1.x) but downloading a whole new tarball is also safer in the sense
that you can try it out, and if that doesn't work just nuke it and
wait for the next release. It is nice to be able to have any number of
installations in parallel (assuming the necessary disk space).
- Robert
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