On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 6:15 AM, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > No offense, but everyone who has written so far in this thread is > speaking only to people who know what the word "toolchain" means in > this context. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't provide a fortran > compiler, and setting one up for those who don't know that word is > nontrivial and goes against the (in my opinion, more important) Sage > philosophy of "batteries included". It's particularly annoying that > on older Macs gfortran isn't even available so we need g95, but that > is also how it is, and we definitely still get people asking about > this platform as well.
+1 > Basically, someone who would like to have a brand spankin' new Sage > they can call their own (as opposed to a binary download) should not > have needless hurdles placed in front of them. Should we provide > gcc? No - downloading Xcode or installing it is a little annoying, > but fairly straightforward even for newbies, because Apple wants to > make it easy for them. But fortran is another matter. Indeed. > Pablo, are you suggesting that sage -sdist would make two different > types of source distributions, one for Mac, one for non-Mac? That > could be confusing, but I guess as long as they were (automatically, > in the sdist process) named VERY clearly, and it was VERY obvious on > the download site which was which (and why there is a difference), > that could be a solution (though it would add some responsibilities to > someone, either web person or release manager). But certainly 33 MB > is nothing to sniff at, particularly in situations with low > bandwidth. What does that (piece of Sage) compress to in the .tgz? It this it is already compressed, so it does not compress any further. Since day 1 Sage has had a certain list of requirements to build which -- as Karl remarks above -- was developed for people who don't know what "toolchain" means. (1) Install development tools that are completely standard to install on your OS. These days, on Linux, this includes GCC = Gnu Compiler Collection, which includes Fortran, no problem. On OS X, installing Fortran is far from standard, since Apple doesn't care about it, and there are several variants out there. (2) Type "make". Removing the Fortran-for-OSX binary from Sage totally breaks this, and I'm completely against breaking (1) and (2) above. Your motivation is: "So users of Linux, Solaris and those porting to other platforms are downloading 33 MB of totally useless code." (1) You could remove fortran-*.spkg from your tarball before downloading it; this could be automated with your own script. (2) "sage -upgrade" could be changed to never grab a new fortran spkg if the operating system isn't OS X. -- William P.S. I care more about (1)-(2) above than about "fortran" per se. With psage, I removed the fortran spkg entirely, and removed everything that depended on it. I did the same with lisp. This keeps (1)-(2), while moving toward a smaller and more maintainable "kernel" that I can then build other things on top of. -- 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
