Hi Peter, some notes on your questions regarding "Sage packaging":
Sage itself is designed in such as way, that it is possible to have quite different versions of Sage installed at the same time, and anywhere in your file system. Since different versions of Sage in general do depend on different versions of some libraries (e.g. gmp/ mpir), the "self-contained-ness" is a necessary ingredient. Sage is also designed in such a way as to be able to run not only under Unix descendants (Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Solaris), but mid-term under native (!) Windows also, and even so for the average Windows user out there. So it is essential to bring each and every tool with it. Sage as a "distribution" consists of rather inhomogeneous parts, it is an art to assemble them together in such a way that they play together rather seamlessly (thinking of Maxima, Pari, ...). So under FreeBSD, Sage might need some "older" versions of certain "ports" and yes, also some "newer" versions of the ports available or even special patches that are very unlikely to find their way "upstream". Finally, the task to "bring Sage under the hood of one of the big distributions" has been sucessfully undertaken in the past --- Sage is available in Debian. See e.g. http://groups.google.com/group/debian-sage/topics. And this work (mainly by Tim Abbott) included exactly what you mentioned, moving certain "packages" out of Sage and into Debian (for some that were not already there), and make Sage-Debian depend on "official" Debian ports, erm, packages. Please note that currently (and for the foreseeable future), Sage- Debian is considered a "branch" of the Sage project that has/is to be maintained independently. There simply are too few Sage core developers to ensure that every new version of Sage is "apt-gettable" under Debian. (Of course it does run as "stand-alone" version out of the box, however!) Cheers, gsw --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
