Deprecate Galgebra?

[arsenovic]

there is modern library actively maintained by tbuli , https://github.com/tBuLi/kingdon

which does symbolic and numerics.

what are peoples thoughts on concentrating efforts on kingdon, and deprecating clifford/galgebra?

pygae/clifford#443

[utensil]

kingdon is a great library covering both symbolic and numeric use cases, but as for the symbolic part, it doesn't cover the complete feature set of GAlgebra, for one, Geometric Calculus, and for another, it can't serve as the companion library for readers of LAGA&VAGC, nor does it aim to.

While new libraries like Kingdon are valuable additions to the ecosystem, I respectfully disagree that this warrants deprecating existing projects like GAlgebra.

As a maintainer and user, I’m seeking clarity on what deprecation would entail. As a user, I still intend to use it in the future. As a maintainer, although I can only come back to work on it on a yearly basis, but I still manage to respond to issues, and intend to release 0.6.0 in near future with features and fixes. Could you clarify:

• Would this deprecation affect GAlgebra’s availability on PyPI?
• Does the pygae organization intend to remove or archive GAlgebra?
• What urgent concerns motivate this proposal now, given ongoing maintenance efforts?

In my view, raising deprecation discussions without first outlining specific technical or maintenance challenges may inadvertently send mixed signals to users.

This is a short and prompt reply, I'll have a longer reply to provide more context of the current status of GAlgebra later. In the meanwhile, may we learn more about the rationale behind the proposal?

[arsenovic]

i should have said 'migrate' instead of 'deprecate'.
there are no intentions of altering anything about GAlgebra without your agreement.
i was opening up the discussion for consolidation of redundant libraries in the same language. but it sounds like they are not redundant and/or it doesnt make sense to consolidate.
i will close the issue for now.

[utensil]

Sorry that I reacted before reading pygae/clifford#443 . I can now see that there are two concrete proposals:

1. make a link on the homepage
2. move future users/devs to kingdon to consolidate effort in the GA python space.

For 1, I had opened #523 #524 with the idea to make GAlgebra more familiar to kingdon users, if/after I have done that, I'll acknowledge kingdon and ganja.js .

For 2, unlike clifford (although I'm not sure about the situation of clifford), GAlgebra consumes little efforts from the community, including mine, because it's now at a very late stage of its lifecycle, so there is no actual benefit of deprecation or migration.

People will use GAlgebra if they need to evaluate more options of GA, or if they need to use GC. If they have issues, I'm still here to respond, while Hugo and Eric have grown past the stage of using GAlgebra. From what I can tell, Hugo is busy with work and makes time for new open-source projects, Eric is busy with work and active in the field of Lean 4 formalization of GA and much much more. Personally I am in a status that I could have more time for open-source projects, but I have so much more to learn and work on so I don't always have time to work on GAlgebra. For example, I wished to release 0.6.0 before the end of 2024 because the heavy work of aborbing Greg's work has been done in 2024, but unfortunately I haven't got around to do that yet.

There is also no need to call for a new maintainer. There are very few users nowadays and they use GAlgebra at the very special stage of their work, mostly to verify their manual calculation in research or other projects. GAlgebra has many hacks towards LaTeX, so there is only humans to see the result of the symbolic simplification, not code generation. Without this to make it more useful, the users will come and go. GAlgebra was a helpful tool when I was learning GA and GC, that's pretty much it. My passion for maintaining GAlgebra comes from appriciating the work of Alan, and wishing to make it more reliable and modern, and it will last for the entirety of my life, which still has many years to come, given that I'm 38 years old. I need to admit that I didn't work on it enough during 2021-2023, because of work and Lean, but I think the future work of GAlegrba should be evaluated by decades, and it will slowly modernize its unique feature sets, by me and future maintainers that are passionate users at the beginning.