On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 5:49 AM, Robert Bradshaw<rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > > On Jun 23, 2009, at 4:56 PM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote: > >> >> From the top README.txt >> >> ------------------------------------------------------- >> NOT SUPPORTED: >> * FreeBSD >> * Arch Linux >> * Gentoo Linux >> * Microsoft Windows (via Visual Studio C++) >> * Microsoft Windows (via Cygwin) >> >> We like all of the above operating systems, but just haven't had >> the time to make Sage work well on them. Help wanted! >> ------------------------------------------------------- >> >> Would it not be sensible to ask around on some FreeBSD/NetBSD mailing >> lists etc, and see if one could drum up enough support to start a >> port? >> >> I don't know much about the *BSD's, having never played with them for >> more than a few minutes, but I can't see why there should be any huge >> hurdles to overcome. >> >> Having a port to those would be one big plus over the >> Mathematica/MATLAB/Maple guys. >> >> Typing FreeBSD into Google I get 20 million hits. For NetBSD it is 7.9 >> million. For Solaris it is 40 million, but of course there is the film >> 'Solaris' and some other users. But the *BSDs seem popular enough to >> warrant at least some effort in getting a port started. > > I'm fairly ignorant about porting, but I think the fact that we > already support OS X (very well) should be interesting to anyone > trying to port to some of the other BSDs.
The main problems with building Sage on BSD, in my experience, are that (1) you have to "gmake" instead of "make" to run the GNU version of Make, which is a pain, (2) similar problems to (1) with other GNU tools and GNU-isms in Sage, (3) it is hard to install Fortran. In hopes of attracting Dan Bernstein as a user, I used to regularly build and test Sage on BSD for a long time, but for about two years there was not a single Sage user that actually used BSD, so I stopped. When I was going to start again, I installed some BSD's into vmware machines on boxen.math, but could not install Fortran, so I gave up (the official install procedure just segfaulted in all cases when installing fortran for me). It would be useful to have access to a BSD box again, i.e., try again to install BSD and fortran, if we want to support BSD. If we don't have access in our standard build testing workflow, then even if Sage works on BSD, it'll just break again. As far as I know, no freeBSD users have ever offered to give any Sage developers accounts for this purporse yet, so installing our our vmware machine is the best bet. If one searches the Sage mailing lists, there is at least one person who I think has posted a number of fixes he needed to build Sage on BSD, some of which mabshoff put into Sage, and some of which he maybe didn't. Wiliam > >> I do know one very tech-savy FreeBSD guy who is a 'time-nut' but would >> no doubt know the places to ask. If you have never come across the >> 'time-nuts', take a look at this for a very accurate wrist atomic >> watch >> which keeps accurate to a few nanoseconds per day, though the battery >> life is a bit on the short side. >> >> http://leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/ >> >> The guy that runs that site (Tom) is a true 'time-nut' and has done >> things like climb mountains with cesium clocks strapped to his >> body. His >> most accurate time-piece is a hydorogen maser. At one point in time >> (excuse the pun), the definition of a second will probably change >> to be >> in terms of oscillations in the hydrogen maser, as it is more stable >> than cesium, in which the second is currently defined. > > Interesting diversion :) > > - Robert > > > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
