On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 12:05 PM, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > > On Jan 21, 2010, at 6:31 AM, Gonzalo Tornaria wrote: > >> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 5:47 PM, Peter Jeremy <peterjer...@acm.org> wrote: >>> >>> My personal feeling is that it would be nice if some of the more generic >>> packages (eg bzip, zlib, readline, mercurial) were moved out of sage >>> and made explicit requirements. >> >> +1 >> >> I think Sage is mature enough now to slowly migrate toward this. >> Besides, there can still be spkgs for those packages, and there could >> be a sage-with-batteries-included tarball with dependencies included. > > What would be the advantage? The easier it is for users to go from a > standard distro/OS X box to a running Sage the better. Also, there's the > much more important Windows port to consider. > > One of the reasons we ship our own of so much stuff is that we require > specific versions (e.g. you can't just drop in a new version of pari, > maxima, or gap, and have it Just Work). Is that an issue for any of the > above packages? Also, we require the dev versions of the above packages, not > just binaries (which is what many systems come with). > > - Robert >
+1 to Robert's comments. I can't tell you how many people just in the last few days have told me that they use (and work on!) Sage *only* because when they try to build it on their computer it "just worked". If it hadn't, they definitely wouldn't be involved with Sage now. Removing bzip, zlib, readline, mercurial, etc. is simply going to greatly reduce the chances for such people. I see my goal with the Sage project as *not* to compete with Pari or Singular or Macaulay2 or to try to get users that would otherwise use those systems. My goal is that Sage can compete with programs such as Mathematica which are self-contained and easy to install on many platforms. I want to make Sage something that appeals to users who do not currently use systems like Pari, Singular, etc., because they find installation and usability of those systems too icky. I think http://sagenb.org (and the notebook in general) is a little first step in that direction, but there are many other steps. Make building Sage from source more difficult isn't a good step though. -- William
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