> > > The way to spoil users of Sage on MacOS (or anywhere) is to create a > binary installer that work really well, >
Correct. This is what all this discussion should be aiming toward - including a binary installer that *allows for compiling/installing of optional packages and Cython*. (Or gives not just a meaningful error if you try to do that and fail, but a precise thing to click on to do it.) The reason why building Sage from source is so important historically is that a newbie on any platform, WITH NO EXPERIENCE USING ANY COMMAND LINE TOOLS, was able to download something, open a Terminal, and get a version of Sage that worked on their particular platform. And to easily update it to the *next* version, or use Cython, or whatever. In the event, this didn't end up being the case long-term - on Mac, at least, largely due to Apple's doing annoying things and then partly due to our changing how to "upgrade". But that is what one would want, to have a "viable open-source competitor to ..." If we can decouple those things from having to build from source, great. It's not clear to me that is the case, because there is so much fragmentation in the computer space. That's not our problem, but it is if we want to attract as many users as possible - including ones who will not be able to follow the instructions in a few posts in this thread, or who have no choice but to stick on older "EOL" platforms - that is what is out there. You can mock people on them, but many of them really cannot afford to upgrade or whoever is controlling their computers will not do it. Obviously it would good to make things less work for both our very hard-working developers and for users. If we can disentangle from Sage-the-distribution effectively, that is fine. Please, let's not have to have Fortran - I guess we already have disentangled R, or else someone would have mentioned that as requiring Fortran? But so far, it's only been demonstrated that either 1) viable easier distros are from projects not in the Sage core codebase like the new Mac app that Nathan D.'s group has created (I know it wasn't just him, I just forget who else) or like Isuru's distribution 2) you need to be well within the Linux ecosystem and conversant with things that a large number of users will not be familiar with. Including some who are highly computer-literate, but not shell-literate. And having the gcc/gfortran, again historically, was a great way to fix that. Apparently that is still the case in a number of situations, or we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's a failsafe for those times, which keep creeping in, and unless Apple itself starts providing the full ecosystem (fat chance), we'll still be relying on the good graces of projects like Homebrew. The point is made several times that an internet solution may work for this. But I have to point out YET AGAIN that not everyone lives in happy internet-land with great connectivity all day long. And Cocalc is a big app for some connectivity situations too ... so that's not the long-term answer. As many of us discovered during the pandemic and all of a sudden even some colleagues in "the West" (whatever that means) did not have as good of internet as we thought. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/c2bfb4c7-fa05-4b59-9c2a-7a5755bb22dfn%40googlegroups.com.
