It's important to have the overall situation for this in mind: - Dima is the main maintainer nowadays for updating packages in sage-the-distro. One should perhaps say the only maintainer. In fact, he has trouble to even find reviewers for package update PRs. - The maintenance burden is way to high: according to https://repology.org/repository/sagemath_develop , 200, or 60%, of the packages in sage-the-distro are outdated.
So if Dima thinks it's too much overhead to update a certain dependency (in the case of boost, we are carrying a 9 year old version), then we should follow that judgment - even if it means the install experience for a certain group of people might be slightly worse. The alternative is a completely unusable and unmaintained sage-the-distro in the future. Unless of course there are now more people that view this as a call to contribute to the updates. BTW, Conda is already the recommended approach for compiling from source. On Friday, September 12, 2025 at 6:48:47 AM UTC+8 Volker Braun wrote: > This is to gather some feedback about future requirements for installing > Sage. https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40689 wants to make > installing boost the user's responsibility to install, which is easy enough > on linux (unless you are not root) and what I would have thought way past > the frustration tolerance of a casual user on macOS if they don't already > use some third-party package manager. > > In that case (plain macOS) you basically have to follow the instructions > on > https://www.boost.org/doc/user-guide/getting-started.html#_download_boost > to compile & install boost by hand. > > I personally don't use macOS unless I absolutely have to, so I don't > really have any skin in the game here. So if you use a mac and have some > thoughts about installing boost, this is your thread ;) > > PS: On a meta-level there are definitely advantages to let somebody else > provide the basic environment. But imho we should then start with a > specific and reproducable basic environment that you can easily install > (and fwiw conda is the only contender here that does not require root and > is cross-platform). And not start by making that switch implicitly as a > side effect of "move boost to prereqs, and by the way here are three > different ways to get boost" > -- 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/c7751480-2955-4f89-bd91-30e34fbdf9d7n%40googlegroups.com.
