I believe I'm the person who introduced that long standing policy. It was indeed motivated by a significant paying customer's requirement to install Sage entirely from source, and without an external network. I believe no such customers have supported the Sage project for about a decade, so I'm very supportive of removing this policy.
However, at least in the not too distant past there have been situations where the non-requirement of internet connectivity alleviated issues of limited internet accessibility in a given locale, limited download speeds, limited grid electricity, etc. This policy just as much affects those situations, and perhaps some people who have installed Sage in such environments (including Sage Days and other events) might want to weigh in on that, and whether such situations still obtain (as I personally assume they must certainly do). I figure three-letter agencies have people with the skills to get around not using pip install, but if your downloads are over a mobile network (or, for that matter, Project Kuiper or Starlink or whatever), you might still want to download Sage - especially now that we don't have binary installs "provided". -- 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/9e61dfb3-bdc3-4fde-8bd3-914ef39a6731n%40googlegroups.com.
