proposal to remove dsage from sage

[William Stein]

Hello,

I officially propose removing DSage from the Sage distribution.

Why?

1. Nobody has worked on the code for years.

2. The guy who originally worked on the code is gone, and can't
work on the code even if he wanted to (due to conditions of his job).

3. So far as I can tell, DSage is completely and totally broken,
and has been for *months* in shipped versions of Sage, so absolutely
nobody could possibly be using it. See
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/7975

If you care, please vote.

[ ] Yes, I don't use DSage (don't even know what it is...), and
think it should be removed from Sage.

[ ] No, I think DSage should stay as is. I love using DSage!

[ ] Sort of -- delete Dsage for now, but if a maintainer/developer
comes along and fixes it so it actually works, then DSage gets back
into Sage for free.

[David Joyner]

I vote for orphaning.

>
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[Adam Webb]

> If you care, please vote.
>
>     [ ] Yes, I don't use DSage (don't even know what it is...), and
> think it should be removed from Sage.
>
>     [ ] No, I think DSage should stay as is.  I love using DSage!
>
>     [ ] Sort of -- delete Dsage for now, but if a maintainer/developer
> comes along and fixes it so it actually works, then DSage gets back
> into Sage for free.

I vote:

[x] Yes, I don't use DSage (don't even know what it is...), and

think it should be removed from Sage.

However, I admit that I have no idea of what it does. ;-)

Adam

[Simon King]

On Jan 18, 12:47 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If you care, please vote.

I don't know if I care, but if I did, my answer would be

    [X] Yes, I don't use DSage (don't even know what it is...), and

think it should be removed from Sage.

And what is it?

Cheers
Simon

[William Stein]

See http://www.sagemath.org/doc/reference/dsage.html

[Nathann Cohen]

Same question.. What is it ? ;-)

Nathann

[John Cremona]

orphaning. I remember thinking it looked great, at a time when I
didn't have a machine on which I could use it.

John

2010/1/18 Nathann Cohen <nathan...@gmail.com>:

> Same question.. What is it ? ;-)
>
> Nathann
>

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

I vote: Remove it, and don't ever, ever allow it back in, even if
somebody wants to actively develop it.

Rationale:
- For simplistic parallell computing on a single machine there's now
other, much simpler solutions implemented

- For running on a real cluster, I believe the approach is wrong. Most
clusters used in academia is run by a professional support staff and
have a sophisticated setup for scheduling jobs. I'd never get DSage set
up correctly on my cluster without pestering a lot of admins. However I
*can* of course integrate Sage with the cluster-provided job scheduling
system in user space if I want to. That's the way to go IMO.

- Running on a small home-brew cluster should a) fall outside of Sage's
scope, and b) use existing libraries rather than home-cooked to a much
larger extent than DSage does (use OpenMPI or Google's Map/Reduce or
something in-between).

Dag Sverre

[Dr. David Kirkby]

William Stein wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I officially propose removing DSage from the Sage distribution.
>
> Why?
>
> 1. Nobody has worked on the code for years.
>
> 2. The guy who originally worked on the code is gone, and can't
> work on the code even if he wanted to (due to conditions of his job).
>
> 3. So far as I can tell, DSage is completely and totally broken,
> and has been for *months* in shipped versions of Sage, so absolutely
> nobody could possibly be using it. See
> http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/7975
>
> If you care, please vote.
>
> [ ] Yes, I don't use DSage (don't even know what it is...), and
> think it should be removed from Sage.

On the basis of

* It does not work
* The maintainer can't even maintain it if he wished now (people do change jobs).

there does not seem a lot of point keeping it in standard, though I'd personally
probably prefer to move it to the experimental packages and add a note there
that it used to work, but no longer does.

http://qadpz.sourceforge.net/

might be a suitable replacement.

Distributed computing for some problems can be very useful.

So I would not remove it completely, but take it out of 'standard' and move to
'experimental'.

Dave

[Robert Miller]

You didn't offer:

[x] Yes, I've used DSage extensively in the past, and I wholeheartedly
agree with removing it from Sage.

The only use I have for dsage anymore is "Hey! The dsage spkg is
compiling! Sage must be almost finished building!"

--
Robert L. Miller
http://www.rlmiller.org/

[Jason Grout]

William Stein wrote:

[X] Yes, I don't use DSage (don't even know what it is...), and

think it should be removed from Sage.

Well, I do know vaguely what it is, but I don't think it should get back
into standard without the usual review process---definitely not for free.

Moving it to experimental sounds like the best option to me.

Thanks,

Jason

[jplab]

Hello everyone,

I worked during months with my computer lab director trying to make
dsage work... We managed once to make it work properly.

In dsage:
-Documentation is anemic;
-Many not implemented functions;
-Bizarre behaviours
-...

My vote is:

[x] - Remove dSage from Sage "and use something else instead".

We resign from using dsage and we now use xgrid on Mac. I found that
Parallel Python could do the job too... I don't know much about this
library, but could it be added to sage some day? I would be glad to
help if we can add it to sage.

Jean-Philippe Labbé

[Robert Bradshaw]

On Jan 18, 2010, at 4:47 AM, William Stein wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I officially propose removing DSage from the Sage distribution.
>
> Why?
>
> 1. Nobody has worked on the code for years.
>
> 2. The guy who originally worked on the code is gone, and can't
> work on the code even if he wanted to (due to conditions of his job).
>
> 3. So far as I can tell, DSage is completely and totally broken,
> and has been for *months* in shipped versions of Sage, so absolutely
> nobody could possibly be using it. See
> http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/7975
>
> If you care, please vote.
>

> [X] Yes, I don't use DSage (though I certainly know what it

> is...), and
> think it should be removed from Sage.

If it's been broken for a while, there aren't backwards compatibility
issues to worry about. I second moving this package out to experimental.

- Robert

[Nathan Dunfield]

[X] Yes, for removal. I tried with little success to use dsage some
years ago, but quickly switched to the "processing" module.

Nathan

[Tim Joseph Dumol]

Hello,

   [ ] Yes, I don't use DSage (don't even know what it is...), and
think it should be removed from Sage.

I've never used it, and it's been broken for a long time.

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--
Tim Joseph Dumol <tim (at) timdumol (dot) com>
http://timdumol.com

[Craig Citro]

>    [X] Yes, I don't use DSage (don't even know what it is...), and

> think it should be removed from Sage.
>

I'm in this group, but I do know one (possibly the only?) DSage user
-- John Voight. Does anyone know if he still uses it?

-cc

[William Stein]

Hi,

DSage is now gone from Sage. See

http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/7975

-- William

> --
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> URL: http://www.sagemath.org
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>

--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

[Serge A. Salamanka]

Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote:
> - For running on a real cluster, I believe the approach is wrong. Most
> clusters used in academia is run by a professional support staff and
> have a sophisticated setup for scheduling jobs. I'd never get DSage set
> up correctly on my cluster without pestering a lot of admins. However I
> *can* of course integrate Sage with the cluster-provided job scheduling
> system in user space if I want to. That's the way to go IMO.

Do you mean you can write an interface for, let's say, TorquePBS/Maui
submition ?
That would be very much useful.
I'll send you an invitation to sage-grid mailing list. May be we could
elaborate smth interesting for cluster environment.
>
> Dag Sverre
>

#Serge