Re: [Gretl-devel] functions vs commands (was Re: Octave support)
Ignacio Diaz-Emparanza schrieb:
Sorry Sven, I agree with Jack and Allin as well. Not only for the
reasons that Jack and Allin has contemplated so far. Another important
resaon may be that, when gretl 2.0 be released, I am sure someone will
be tempted to write a review in an econometrics journal. This will be a
very important method to advertise gretl and probably enlarge her
difussion. What do you think he/she will write if gretl 2.0 contains
only bug-fixes and backward-incompatible changes ? I am with Jack in
that this version should have as much improvements as we can made.
Ok, I think you convinced me that it would not be a good idea to base
the (major) version numbers on syntax issues. I might have been focused
too much on the Python 2 vs. 3 analogy (BTW, I implicitly assumed that
everyone knows what the analogy means, which of course is far from
obvious: Python 3 changed some things and broke compatibility quite
heavily, that's why most of the production code out there is still based
on python 2.x. This parallelism is of course infeasible and not
desirable for gretl.).
That seems to leave two possibilities:
1) make 1.9 the syntax-"breaking" release, followed by a super-duper 2.0
feature release
2) roll everything into 2.0
Option (1) would have the advantage to get a chance to iron out the bugs
coming from the massive underlying changes in 1.9 to have a killer 2.0
version. It would also buy time to actually get the features ready for 2.0.
Option (2) would be better in the sense that it's easier to communicate
that syntax was changed in version 2.0.
Jack: Why do you think gretl needs a feature-laden 2.0 this year? Of
course it would be cool, but you sound as if it's a matter of life and
death. I'm not convinced, but as you saw before, that might change.
thanks,
sven