Proposal discussion for Cantor: Python 3 as the only backend officially supported

[Filipe Saraiva]

Hello Alex;

Em 08-01-2018 19:25, Alexander Semke escreveu:
>> My proposal is officially maintain only Python 3 backend, move the other
>> backends to a community/third-party repository and, if someone cares
>> about them, release some of them as extensions in KDE Store.
> Nobody, well, except of you, cares about them at the moment. Why should 
> this change if you move this code to KDE store?
> 

The bug reports show there are some people using some of them. In order
to not remove completely these features, they can be released in KDE Store.

But I will not put these extensions there. Just in case someone cares
about them, this person will be accountable for do it - not me.

>>
>> This way I can work better with Cantor.
>>
>> Just to say, I tried in past solve it inviting developers to be
>> co-maintainers of the backends, but it does not work as I expected.
> This is understandable. At least for big players like python and julia 
> that have Jupyter, R that has R-Studio, Sage that has cocalc.com and 
> Octave and scilab with their own frontends. Why should the developers 
> from these communities care about Cantor?
> 
> To attract more developers we need to improve Cantor greatly first and 
> to provide some benefits and advantages compared to other solutions. I 
> know, this is kind of a hen egg problem, but still..
> 

In fact.

> Which backends are causing the most problems at the moment? Is it Sage? 
> Maxima?
> 

R was broken for several years, but there is a fix now (not released
yet). Sage breaks for each new release. Julia had some problems with
previous versions. Lua has bugs after a new release.

Scilab was unstable for some previous releases but now it is working.
Octave and KAlgebra/Analitza are working fine, but the first one
sometimes had small bugs to be fixed. Python 2 and 3 are ok.

I don't know about the status of Maxima and Qalculate.

Cheers;

-- 
Filipe Saraiva
http://filipesaraiva.info/