On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 6:22 AM, Harald Schilly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Apr 10, 2:14 pm, mhampton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > A link to 7zip.org right by the archive or in the install instructions > > would help. > > will be there ... > > > > but I'm not convinced that computer literacy of any depth > > as increased ... > > Yes, especially because I think that's far more general. That computer > literacy only increases, if there is some interest/force/reward to > master the problems [e.g. nobody knows more about graphic cards + > drivers than active gamers!], but this applies to all areas in life. > Humans constantly optimize themselves and new things with a barrier > are avoided, if there are other shorter path to accomplish the task. > Even if in a long term period the initial higher investment would have > the greater return of investment. So, emphasis should be in explaining > why an open system with involvement of everybody is better than a > closed up encapsulated for-profit one. Then the motivation is higher > to master install instructions. > But, disclaimer, that's just my private theory concerning the "dumb > colorful point and click" vs. "complex and fast functionality" war ;)
We should make Sage as easy or easier to install than any of Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, or Magma. I see no reason to compromise on this at all, since the goal is to provide a viable alternative to Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, and Magma. Part of this is that Sage must be as easy to install as those programs. I don't think we should try to convince people to install a difficult-to-install version of Sage because it will be better for them in the long run. The right thing to do is to make Sage easier to install. That's been my philosophy since I started Sage, and is why Sage comes as a complete install, instead of something incomplete with a huge number of dependencies. Until now the main goal has been growing the developer community, so a lot of effort has gone into making Sage easy to install *for developers*. I think Sage is in fact easier to install for developers (i.e., to get a full developer environment setup) than most math software projects. By this I mean that if one were to become a Magma developer the barrier to getting everything setup on your system to do development would I think be higher than for Sage. Incidentally, here are last weeks download numbers on sagemath.org and sage.math.washington.edu (2 of the download sites): Linux Binary: 81 OS X Binary: 42 Source: 76 VMware: 95 TOTAL: 294 -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
