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ianhinder / Kranc

A Mathematica package for generating code for solving time dependent partial differential equations
http://kranccode.org
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Define required version of Mathematica #40

Open ianhinder opened 13 years ago

ianhinder commented 13 years ago

We recently discovered that the current version of Kranc requires at least Mathematica version 7. We should define a Mathematica version with which Kranc is guaranteed to run. Features from newer versions should only be used if we are willing to stop supporting older Mathematica versions.

barrywardell commented 12 years ago

What version would you suggest as a minimum requirement? I would say it's reasonable to expect at least version version 6, which was released 5 years ago. It might also be reasonable to expect version 7 which was released nearly three and a half years ago. In reality, the problem is that most (all?) Kranc developers are using version 8 at this point so it will be difficult for us to guarantee that new changes maintain backwards compatibility.

Once we decide on a version, we should add a check for this when Kranc is loaded.

ianhinder commented 12 years ago

I think the important thing is to be able to test that it works. If we don't have access to anything older than 7, then we should not say we support it.

The required version could be set for each release of Kranc (which correspond to the ET releases). If someone does not have a new-enough version of Mathematica, it would then be possible to point them back to the version which was last tested to work. For each release, we could test Kranc against each version we have access to and say which versions it works with. Isn't there some automated checking tool in Mathematica to identify possible problems related to versions? Is this just for notebooks, or also for packages?

barrywardell commented 12 years ago

The discussion on the following page is relevant to this issue: http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/2047/automated-testing-for-compatibility-with-older-mathematica-versions.