On Mon, 2022-04-25 at 00:39 -0700, seb....@gmail.com wrote: > > So, what do we advertise to potential newcomers to Sage? I think despite > such great things as Cocalc, SageMathCell and Gitpod, there should be > something easy to install that can be used offline, too. >
Everyone agrees on that part, but how to go about it is a religious matter. I've been using sage, teaching with sage, writing papers that cite sage, and giving presentations about my research that use sage for about fifteen years. I have literally never met someone besides myself who has managed to install it. The only installation procedure that anyone uses is, 1. Give the computer to mjo 2. It comes back in the morning with sage installed The best way to accomplish the goal of "easy to install" is to make sage easy to package. It will then be installable with a single command on any linux distribution, on WSL, or on homebrew. That is, on every platform we support. (We don't support cygwin in practice any more.) Binary packages will *never* work. You simply can't cover every combination of kernel, system library, and CPU. Similarly, using python packaging (pip install sage) will *never* work. Many of sage's dependencies are not python packages, and making then pip-installable amounts to reinventing all of Debian but hosted on pypi. Still, you will not cover all target systems, because those packages are necessarily binary packages (pip can't build C programs), and binary packages will *never* work. Since binary packages will never work, we should focus on making the source distribution sane. Not necessarily as friendly as possible for new users, who should not be its target audience -- but as standard and as robust as possible for developers and distribution packagers. In other words, sage should be easy to develop and package. Once it's easy for the distros and homebrew to package it, it will also be easy to install. Right now we have the worst of both worlds, where there's no easy way to install it, and the source distribution is absolutely bonkers. Any honest installation instructions begin with two pages of apologizing for the horrors you're about to encounter. Then the user wastes two or three days getting build failures, until they eventually throw up their hands and goto step (1). Making the source distribution "less friendly" as in intermediate step may be counter-intuitive, but making it "less special" is the answer to these problems in the long term. -- 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/bb6d483a3c737796b0cd0121e90d0d1ab77539e0.camel%40orlitzky.com.
