RE: [Axiom-developer] gold/src/hyper/search.pamphlet

[Page, Bill]

On Wednesday, November 29, 2006 11:32 AM Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> 
> root wrote:
> > quite curious that this code never worked and nobody noticed.
> > 
> 
> Nothing strange.  Axiom contains a lot of unfinished code (or even
> pure junk) and this is one more such piece.  I would not say that
> nobody noticed -- my experience tells me that most users do not
> bother reporting bugs.

I agree.

> Typical reaction is "X is junk" or "if I do this in a such way
> then X works" (where "X" is a program).  Only rare folks report
> bugs but it is easy to discourage them. In particular you lose
> reporters when there is no reaction to bug reports or if bug
> are not fixed for long time.

True.

> I must say that IssueTracker paints a very bad picture of Axiom:
> numerous old unfixed bugs, many without any usefull comment. 
> 

On the contrary, I think it represents the true state of Axiom.
I am sure that it even understates the case. There are many more
bugs of course that have been found by someone but not entered in
the tracking system. I think it would not be usual for a system as
complex as Axiom to have many 1000s of reported bugs. This is
certainly the case with both Maple and Mathematica - the only
difference is that for commercial strategic reasons they do not
make this information public. But Axiom is an open source project.

The true situation is that the Axiom project is critically short
of developers. It is also short of people willing to volunteer for
testing and updating bug reports. But some bugs have been fixed
and some bugs are continuing to be reported. And we have more
Axiom developers this year than last year, so it is not as bad
as it could be.

What suggestions do you have for improving the situation?

Regards,
Bill Page.