To the extent that this specific PR is emblematic of a particular approach
to Sage development (a flawed approach in Dima's view, if I understand
right), then the whole approach should be discussed here. Probably many of
these issues in Sage development have been discussed already, but it's
probably time to revisit them, to see if we can reestablish a baseline
level of consensus.
As a person who has been involved in Sage a long time, I just want to +1
John's remark that major issues involving the direction and approach to
Sage development, even if they have been discussed before, are definitely
something that should be discussed again. The optimal choices for a Sage
can easily change as the world changes, and there are many relevant factors
to Sage's development that are massively different now than in the past.
Examples: python is much more popular now than ever before; GPU's are
vastly more powerful now than before; GitHub with its amazing free CI
infrastructure exists; Conda exists; GCC isn't the only free C compiler;
WebAssembly exists, ...
Thanks, William, that's great perspective.
Relevant to both the overall issue of project direction *and* the specific
one about Sage-as-distribution, I would just add keeping in mind the Sage
mission (at least, as it currently stands):
Mission: *Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple,
Mathematica and Matlab*.
Digression, but not really: That this is related to the packaging
discussion is evident in that different packaging scenarios have different
outcomes for end users, especially those *not* on Linux, which I for one
would like to see more numerous than those on Linux, since that's where the
people doing (and teaching!) math probably still are, in reality. It would
be great to live fully in the Python world as well as achieve this, but
perhaps these goals are not in the same subspace. (Or maybe they are.)
As just one example, here is a very recent discussion that (partly) is
about how to use Sage on Windows (by people not necessarily averse to CLI
stuff).
https://groups.google.com/g/pretext-support/c/2_4Lz6fRKjM
Since these people are *atypical* among people doing math in their
proclivities to try out all kinds of new toys (as opposed to just doing
math), I suspect strongly that the last embray-produced Windows binary is
still used WAY more than any WSL solution, because even if people *can*
figure out how to use it, would they bother if they have a proprietary
option available instead?
This is a good place to thank embray and darthandrus (among many others)
for work on previous Windows and Mac "one-click" download options, and
especially the 3-manifolds project for the current one for Mac. Any
changes (or lack thereof) to Sage-as-distribution that makes one-download
easier for Windows and Mac are probably the best in this important sense -
and anything that makes it significantly harder for 3-manifolds is probably
one to discuss carefully first.
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