On Monday, 31 March 2025 at 17:38:06 UTC-7 Trevor Karn wrote: What was the original intent behind having the dual requirements of (i) a system python and (ii) a SPKG python both in Sage? What (once upon a time) did having a SKPG do that couldn't/shouldn't/wouldn't be done by the system python?
At the very start of sage (some 20 years ago) a big selling point of sage was to bundle all software necessary for sage *together* with tight version specs set between the components (really: fixed version combination, because everything was bundled). At the time this was great, because open source math software was notoriously difficult to get built. Sage was actually a fairly reliable way of getting a bunch of mathematical software actually built and usable on your machine. (Sage was about "building the car, not reinvent the wheel", so most functionality was in libraries and systems shipped, with the sage library primarily providing glue to easily commicate with the different component. So in that sense, sage really started out as a distribution) Python wasn't as standard yet either, so a choice was made to have *some* python requirement to get things bootstrapped (I guess to avoid having to write shell scripts that would have to deal with all the subtle incompatibilities between different shells), but then build python in order to ensure we knew exactly what version to rely on for actual operation. At some point, the sage python package did have some patches included. Python has now become much more standard and probably a bit more stable in its features too. So it may well be that the benefit from having an exact python isn't as big any more. We're not usually building gcc either. -- 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 visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/c219eac9-1da4-43ba-a034-e86e62b12d57n%40googlegroups.com.
