Re: [Gretl-devel] time for 1.9.8?
On 02/24/2012 04:22 AM, Allin Cottrell wrote:
On Wed, 22 Feb 2012, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
* Major new functionality: Well, if we're talking C code, then at
present that means stuff that Jack and I will produce. I put my view
on this at the 2011 gretl conference: I think we now have a good
enough baseline that people ought to be able to add functionality to
gretl in the form of function packages and "addons".
I think that the "addon" feature alone is enough to justify a 2.0
version, because it fundamentally changes the way how gretl can receive
new functionality. This would be easy to communicate to old and new
users. As I see it, it is now in a state of beta testing, and calling
the version 2.0 would constitute the claim that it's reasonably stable.
And documented, see below.
* Purge of bugs and update/completion of documentation: Here I can
really get on board. One conception of gretl 2.0 is that it has
achieved a degree of maturity where we have squashed as many bugs as
we can find on an extended period of testing, and have documented in
a reasonably comprehensible and cross-referenced form all that the
program can do.
@bugs: I don't see how we will find bugs at an accelerated rate. Feature
freeze/extended testing is probably good because it means no new bugs.
@documentation: Here I would suggest some kind of realistic deadline and
individual commitments to certain missing parts. What do I mean by
realistic: in my case probably not before July (sorry! -- but it would
be a commitment).
And wrt Jack's mention of parallelism: Indeed, and I'm currently trying
to get into that from the Python side. Recent Matlab versions can pretty
straightforwardly use Nvidia GPUs already (the "Parallel" toolkit is
needed for that). I think it would be a good topic for a kind of
technical session at the next gretl conference.
cheers,
sven