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

Hi Kolja,

have a look at the thread "news on the refactoring of the _expression_ template mechanism" (http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.eigen/4480) for some more materials on the status of this refactoring. I should have time to work on it again within two weeks. I think that we are about 70% done, and I hope that by end of June we'll start to see the light.

Right now, there is nothing really easy to be done because I'm refactoring the sparse world and this requires some global adjustments, but once sparse matrices will be properly supported by the new engine, then the rest of the refactoring should be much more mechanical.

I'll keep the list informed.

Gael.

On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 9:07 AM, Kolja Brix <brix@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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