Nils,

I think that your assessment of the situation is accurate, and that your 
proposed solution:

> We could just have a configure flag "--install_own_python" to allow the 
prerequisite requirement to be fulfilled by
> building the python spkg; an option that would by default be off.

would be ideal for the Sage_macOS project.  I would be very happy with that 
as a course of action.

- Marc

PS I am sure that there would still be problems building Sage with a broken 
or out-of-date homebrew installation.  I also would expect that the 
non-existence of a "normal" system pip command on various linux systems, 
including Ubuntu-24.04, will be problematic.   Issues such as those would 
manifest at a different stage of the build process, which might help focus 
on how best to deal with them.


On Sunday, April 6, 2025 at 11:41:21 AM UTC-5 Nils Bruin wrote:

It looks to me that there are two points of view here.

1) Having sagemath detect python version requirements and build its own if 
not acceptable version is found leads to increased support requests.

2) The macos app should package its own python and that is conveniently 
done by letting sagemath build its own python

>From what I understand, it would seem "1)" would be handled more 
effectively if sage, instead of building python, would give an error about 
the python version not available; preferably with some hints about where a 
suitable python can be found (by the looks of it: conda or system 
resources), because users would be guided towards installing python through 
other means and they wouldn't ask sage-support for how to do that.

It seems to me that for 1) it isn't so important if python occurs as an 
spkg or not -- the main issue there would be resolved if the build process 
would not default to initiating building python. So it would seem that it's 
simply the python version detection code that can be adjusted. We could 
just have a configure flag "--install_own_python" to allow the prerequisite 
requirement to be fulfilled by building the python spkg; an option that 
would by default be off.

Then 2) can still get its python from the usual source. It would just have 
to pass a flag to its configure.

I realize that some opinions here are more centering on "should python3 
remain as an spkg" in sagemath, but from what I've seen it's not the code 
quality or the volume in bits that is really the issue here: it's that 
building python ends up happening in many cases where there's already 
something else wrong in the setup or prerequisited and building python 
masks that issue. So perhaps a good first step is to see if we can avoid 
python-building masking such issues.

We can then see if the costs of having the python.spkg around provide 
enough benefit (for the MacOS app, by the looks of it).

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