Feature #1701
Preliminary packages
Description
Some while ago Kreuzer gave me many CoCoA packages developed by his students over the years.
I did look at a few of them: they are not really fully robust an ready for release.
Ideally we would have time to make them fully robust, and fully documented. In practice
we do not have the resources.
I would like to discuss the idea of making them available as preliminary packages
(not fully tested, not well-documented). Some people may find them useful; and if we
are lucky, maybe someone else will take the time to finish them. That seems better
than leaving them to gather dust in some remote directory in my file system.
Is this a reasonable suggestion? If so, how might we actually go about making them
public?
Related issues
History
#1
Updated by John Abbott over 1 year ago
Updated by As an example, there was a package implementing some common "transcendental functions" (e.g. sin, log).
I think the caller had to specify how many terms of the Taylor expansion to use.
The aim was not extreme speed, but at least to offer a way of computing such values (to an approximation which
the caller may specify).
#2
Updated by John Abbott over 1 year ago
- Status changed from New to In Progress
- % Done changed from 0 to 10
Anna approves the idea (in a nebulous way).
There are some thorny questions:
(A) how will these packages be documented?
(B) how can a normal user discover these packages, and their documentation
(C) Docmentation has several forms: on-line, latex, html
#3
Updated by John Abbott over 1 year ago
Created new directory: src/CoCoA-5/packages/preliminary/
We'll think about documentation later...
#4
Updated by Anna Maria Bigatti over 1 year ago
Updated by - Related to Support #242: CoCoA-5 Projects for students (e.g. crediti F and tesi) added
#5
Updated by Anna Maria Bigatti over 1 year ago
- Related to Feature #1001: CoCoALib: ideas for student projects added
#6
Updated by John Abbott about 1 month ago
We can put a page for preliminary packages in the main manual. It should either contain a list of the packages (and how to access them), or else an indication of where more information can be found. The advantage of the latter approach is that the main manual (which is now quite large) would not need to be changed each time there is a change to some preliminary package.