Re: [eigen] Bug 99 and other bugs; was: Bugs on bugzilla

[Kolja Brix <brix@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Benoît and all other Eigen users and developers!

On 29.05.2014 20:03, Benoit Jacob wrote:

> Thanks for starting this conversation. It makes me very happy and
> hopeful for the future of Eigen, as I have been thinking --- with
> regret --- for a long time about what I/we may have done wrong in
> growing the Eigen developer community.
>
> Eigen was sort of my first serious FOSS project. I thought of it
> purely in terms of solving technical problems. I didn't understand
> the social consequences of making the codebase more complex.
>
> If I could go back in time and change one thing, I would have us care
> more and earlier about easing outside contributions. Case in point: a
> long time ago, around the 3.0 release, we considered writing a lot of
> internal documentation, but then we thought that we should rather fix
> bug 99 first as it would cause deep changes in these internals. We
> made a mistake there: we should have stuck to plans of internal
> documentation back then.
>
> It's not too late, and it makes me very, very happy to see this topic
> brought up now.

Benoît, thank you for your message. No, it is not too late!

Of course, I agree having "bug 99" fixed, i.e. to complete the
restructuring of the core parts and introduction of the evaluators, is
important and technically a great step forward.

So what is the current status of "bug 99"? I noticed the corresponding
web page 
<http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Working_notes_-_Expression_evaluator>
but did not see so many changes lately. Is the list up to date?

On that page, I did not understand all the details although I have
studied Gael's presentation slides. What, for example, is a
"dispatcher"? What is its task and when is it needed?

If you could inform us about the details of the refactoring plans, e.g.
sketch the classes, files and naming conventions and which component
does what, we could possibly find more users that would like to help
with the implementation, see also Tobias Wood's message. By some
advertisement on the Eigen main web page saying that help is needed you
will for sure attract more new contributors.

Moreover, can you rate tasks 6-10 and 12-14 (see web page linked above)
by the difficulty of implementation? Which ones should the experts do
themselves and which can be delegated to others? How about some type of
mentoring or tutorial (Thanks Mark!)?


Concerning other bugs: Jitse and Christoph, can we identify those that
are dependent or independent of bug 99 and sort them by some priority?

A big thanks to all contributors! Keep up the good work!

--
Best wishes!

   Kolja