On Oct 22, 2009, at 4:45 PM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote: > > Peter Jeremy wrote: >> On 2009-Oct-16 13:05:02 +0100, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net >> > wrote: >>> I'm updating a configure script which will warn users if their >>> operating system >>> is too old. In the case of a Solaris 9 machine it will say: >> >> Whilst I agree in principal, I have some concerns about the wording. >> >>> configure: WARNING: You are using Solaris 9, which is a very old >>> version >>> configure: WARNING: last released in 2004. Solaris 10 was first >>> released in >>> configure: WARNING: 2005, and there have been many updates since >>> then. You >>> configure: WARNING: are advised to upgrade to Solaris 10 or later, >> >> This is all very nice in principal but may not be possible in >> practice >> due to requirements for other applications. Eg, we still have a >> Solaris >> 2.6 server to support an old application. Whilst the application >> might >> work with Solaris 10, that would require effort to upgrade the OS and >> then regression test the application - for which there is no funding. > > I had changed the wording somewhat anyway, but I would admit I had not > considered other applications. > > I also added a check for the old sun4m and sun4c systems, as they > can not be > upgraded to Solaris 10. > > I'm well there may be reasons for sticking to an older OS, though > Solaris has > excellent binary compatibility. Obviously there are exceptions, but > generally it > it runs on version N, it will run on N+1, N+2 etc. > >> I suspect you will find that Solaris 9 is still in fairly common use. >> Whether it's used widely enough to justify a Sage release, I'm not >> certain. (And I'm not certain how much effort would be needed to >> build Sage on Solaris 9). > > I would agree Solaris 9 is in quite common use. If Wikipedia is to > be trusted, > Solaris 9 will be supported by Sun until 2014, and even Solaris 8 to > 2012. So > neither should be written off. > > The current wording I have is: > > if test x$build_os = 'xsolaris5.0 || test x$build_os = > 'xsolaris5.1' \ > || test x$build_os = 'xsolaris5.2' || test x$build_os = > 'xsolaris5.3' \ > || test x$build_os = 'xsolaris5.4' || test x$build_os = > 'xsolaris5.5' \ > || test x$build_os = 'xsolaris5.5.1' || test x$build_os = > 'xsolaris5.6' \ > || test x$build_os = 'xsolaris5.7' || test x$build_os = > 'xsolaris5.8' \ > || test x$build_os = 'xsolaris5.9'
Is there not a way to say \le solaris6.x? Listing all blacklisted systems explicitly seems both brittle and cumbersome. >>> I think I'll have to leave any tests for linux (or let someone else >>> write them), as I believe there are too many different distributions >>> to worry about. >> >> It would be nice to have a list of base OS shared libraries that Sage >> expects and do a check against the available libraries. I'm not sure >> how much effort this would be. > > There are many things that are checked in configure scripts, but I > do not know > what are actually needed. Does Sage need 'yacc' or 'bison' for > example? If I > knew it did, then I could add a test for that early on, to save > someone the > trouble of spending hours building Sage, only to find they need > something which > we could have checked for earlier. > > I would imagine producing a list of what libraries and programs are > needed for > every Sage package would be a very daunting task. If each developer > agreed to > document exactly what one package needed, then it would be possible. > For for any > single person to do so for 100+ packages would be too much to ask. I > certainly > would not wish to do that. You mean like the list of dependancies at http://www.sagemath.org/doc/installation/source.html or http://www.sagemath.org/mirror/src/README.txt ? One of the goals of Sage is to have very few dependancies. Or are those out of date now? - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
