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Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 07:35:06 -0500
From: Phil Steitz <phil.steitz@gmail.com>
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To: Commons Developers List <dev@commons.apache.org>
Subject: Re: [math] getting changes included into commons-math (was Re: Home
 for the colt fork)
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Luc Maisonobe wrote:
> Jake Mannix a �crit :
>> On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Benson Margulies <bimargulies@gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> This is interesting. We have a raft of mathematically qualified
>>> committers on Mahout, and this message asking for help on
>>> commons-math, and a raft of code marooned at mahout that wants to be
>>> in commons math. If I were one of those mathematically competant
>>> individuals, I'd be off attaching a patch or three to a JIRA or two
>>>
>> The commons-math linear APIs have been described as effectively locked
>> until 3.0, due to back-compat requirements.  This means that any code
>> contributed
>> into c-math would live in a parallel (no pun intended) to the linear
>> primitives which
>> exist already in there.
>>
>> Adopting something like MTJ or Colt in Mahout turned out to be easier,
>> because
>> we are on release 0.2 (heading for 0.3 now), and have less stringent
>> back-compat
>> requirements, so we are overhauling our linear apis (read: even user-facing
>> interface changes) to take advantage of useful parts of Colt, and are
>> planning on
>> using our Colt fork as the underlying implementation.
>>
>> Commons-math expressed that changing linear APIs is not something they can
>> do,
>> given the maturity of their library, so where would Colt *go* in c-math?
>> It's own
>> submodule, having its own eigendecompositions and svd and so forth, running
>> parallel to the current c-math impls?  Why?
>>
>> Who would maintain it and write tests for it, and how do you explain to
>> end-users which they should use?
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Luc Maisonobe <Luc.Maisonobe@free.fr>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Ted Dunning a �crit :
>>>>> Actually, the reason that we have Colt in Mahout is it has proven
>>> impossible
>>>>> to get changes into commons math.  We really, really wanted to use
>>> commons
>>>>> math rather than have our own linear algebra package, but it just proved
>>>>> impossible and we didn't want to wait forever.
>>>> If you really, really wants to use commons math and want changes to be
>>>> included, contribute them.
>> I have submitted patches for the following tickets: MATH-312 (and acceptance
>> of that patch blocks my patch for MATH-314), MATH-316 and MATH-317, none
>> of which have appear to have had much progress on.  All of my patches come
>> with unit tests for new functionality.
> 
> I had these patches in my backlog and considered them accepted. I should
> have commited them before, sorry for that. I'll take care of them right now.
> 
>> On the other hand, when I opened the discussion about extending the
>> functions
>> package to enable composable functions (MATH-313), I got an entirely hostile
>> response, which only tempered as far as "+0" on adding it after discussion.
> 
> The discussion was not entirely hostile as we get some intermediate
> consensus at some points. I understand your feelings after several
> patches that did not get committed fast enough.
> 
> Please accept my apologizes for this.

I have to apologize as well here for lack of cycles to help get
[math] patches in recently.  That should improve shortly.

Phil
> 
> Luc
> 
>> In particular, my first step at making commons-math something Mahout could
>> standardize on for linear work was MATH-312, which I did submit a patch for,
>> and revised it many times after discussion about what is acceptable practice
>> in c-math.  Not yet applied, months later.  It's probably far out of date
>> now...
>>
>> Similarly, when I tried to ask what the status on decisions on whether to
>> adopt
>> MTJ or Colt, the statement by Phil was basically that commons-math would not
>> adopt anything which had any external dependencies or
>> not-easily-human-readable java source (which ruled out MTJ because of f2j
>> produced code), and which had to be fully tested and maintained prior to
>> adoption (which rules out Colt which has no unit tests yet).
>>
>> Ted and I weren't making "requests" for other people to do work, we were
>> wondering whether even offers to do some of the work would be accepted,
>> and for many of the questions/suggestions we had, it seems the desires
>> and requirements of the Mahout community were incompatible with those
>> of commons-math.
>>
>>   -jake
>>
>>
>>>  > I think the only change that was proposed and not done because of lack
>>>> of consensus was the inclusion of MTJ (and I don't consider the
>>>> discussion closed on that topic either, so it may still happen some
>>>> day). All the other changes that are desired are simply lacking someone
>>>> to do the work. There were proposals to extend the linear algebra API,
>>>> proposals to add more support for sparse matrices, proposals to get
>>>> partial decomposition ... But sparse contributions (pun intended).
>>>>
>>>> I try to do what I can, but as you have probably seen have been rather
>>>> silent since 2.0 release. For my part, I really, really need help. I
>>>> would like to fix the problems in the eigen decomposition and SVD but
>>>> need a good kick to get on it, and having only requests and no help is
>>>> not really motivating.
>>>>
>>>> Luc
>>>>
>>>>> If that problem were solved, then it would be great to depend on commons
>>>>> math.  If that problem isn't solved, then there is no way to depend on
>>>>> commons math.
>>>>>
>>>>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 6:19 AM, Benson Margulies <bimargulies@gmail.com
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> We can't possibly have a dependency on Mahout in the long term. Either
>>>>>> we all go shares on code in some other piece of commons, or we end up
>>>>>> with two forks, which would be sad.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 8:33 AM, James Carman <
>>> james@carmanconsulting.com>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>> I wouldn't like to see a dependency on mahout code in a "commons"
>>>>>>> library.  That seems kind of backwards.  If Mahout wants to offload
>>>>>>> this stuff, we can move it into a library in commons (which is
>>>>>>> typically how stuff used to happen in Jakarta).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 8:18 AM, Benson Margulies <
>>> bimargulies@gmail.com>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>> Mahout now has a fork of a portion of the 'category A' portion of the
>>>>>>>> CERN colt library forked. The Mahout fork is, of course, in the
>>> Mahout
>>>>>>>> tree under a Mahout Java package and Maven triple.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I want to use the collections classes from Mahout as the core to a
>>> new
>>>>>>>> set of commons-primitives classes that do the useful things that GNU
>>>>>>>> Trove does.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> The classes I want to start from depend on the classes that are in
>>> the
>>>>>>>> Mahout fork.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> As a temporary expedient, I can depend on their there. However, I
>>>>>>>> submit that it would be more better if the mathematical code were in
>>>>>>>> commons-math. Was this option explored?
>>>>>>>>
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> 
> 
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