[Scilab-Dev] [oldEmptyBehaviour()] displaying a warning message in both Scilab 5 and Scilab 6 behavior

[Éric Dubois]

Hello Clément

As for me, I do not need more time I think: I have made all tests I could do (tests of existing demos, systematic search of declarations of empty matrices and manual exploration of their use in the rest of the code, running programs with empty matrices or with input that could lead to empty matrices every time I could imagine such cases). But I cannot be sure to have solved all potential problems and I am almost sure that some of my users will discover ones. 

What I wanted to say is that I fear that some users will only discover the problem with the stable 6.0 because they will not bother downloading the beta one (this was my cases when I started using Scilab). This mailing list cannot be representative of the median user! 

I do not understand why minor changes in "minor" Scilab upgrades should be announced much in advance, while major changes in major Scilab upgrades could be announced with much shorter notice. After all Scilab 6.0 is underway since a very Long Time and you have started communicating and exchanging with users on the major changes a long Time ago: the empty matrix behaviour comes  therefore as a last minute surprise that is as odds with all the -virtuous- previous practices.

I am not a computer scientist, so maybe I am wrong, but I had the feeling that alpha versions were quasi definitive versions, which were to be modified at the margin, to correct bugs or inappropriate features: the Scilab 6.0.alpha version does not conform to this scheme.

More broadly I feel disturbed by this new handling of the project. In the same way, I feel also disturbed by the fact that toolboxes can remain a long Time unpackaged under Atoms, as indicated by Michael Baudin.

Scilab remains a great software, and I appreciate the effort made to improve it, but these recent events are not very good signals as regards its future...

Regards

Éric (alias Don Quichotte...)

Envoyé de mon iPhone

> Le 8 avr. 2016 à 12:32, Clément David <clement.david at scilab-enterprises.com> a écrit :
> 
> Hello Eric,
> 
>> Le jeudi 07 avril 2016 à 22:48 +0200, Eric Dubois a écrit :
>> I suspect that a beta cycle is not enough and that some toolbox developers or other users are not
>> aware of this coming change. Once again this is much shorter than previous changes, which were
>> handled much more smoothly by the Scilab team... Why still shorten the adaptation time? Except to
>> mark the difference with the predecessors? 
> 
> Hmm after questioning myself, I think that is due to the Scilab 6.0.0 major version nature. We want
> to push the better into it before the release. I guess the next iteration to 6.1 will be much more
> focused on new features (added functions) and without existing behavior modification.
> 
>> Happy to see that at least (and at last) someone does not find compelling the case of changing
>> this behaviour. 
> 
> Samuel is not the only one, I am also quiet conservative and my question is only about warning on
> valid code :).
> 
>> By the way I have spent something like 2 weeks modifying my code and, even if I hope having found
>> most of the concerned cases, I am sure not to have found all... and like Samuel the resulting code
>> is sometimes less clean than before. And I, have been obliged to stop ongoing developments to do
>> this stuff, which is from my point of view a bad oiutcome.
> 
> That's exactly the needed information I requested ! Thanks for writing me that you need more than a
> beta cycle to migrate your code. Probably other users will also need some time to notice the change
> and migrate.
> 
> --
> Clément
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