Hi folks, for sime time now, there is a tendency of the Sage distribution to become unmaintanable (only minutes ago, I read the upteenth message thread and trac ticket about the recurrent Suse Linux 11.x/Arch Linux bash/readline issue ...).
There are several possibilities/ways to go. One way I explored recently, was to set up Gentoo Prefix on my Mac (see http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/index.xml), and then try to install gentoo-on-sage onto it (see http://github.com/cschwan/sage-on-gentoo). Although I never had used Gentoo before, and OS X 10.4 is not anymore supported out-of-the-box from Gentoo Prefix (e.g. I had to manually add two more patches to the recent gcc-apple "ebuilds"), I essentially got through the bootstrapping with success (resulting in a fully working Gentoo Prefix "base system" of about 100 packages), and got the sage-on-gentoo overlay integrated far enough to see how many more package would be needed (some 150 packages more). That's a total of roughly 250 packages. But remembering that the current Sage distribution has 97 spkg's, I consider this still a very manageable number. And it really means "all batteries included", including a gcc, bash, and everything --- except an OS kernel. Conceptually, those 250 packages do work on a Linux kernel, a Darwin kernel (Mac OS), BSD kernels, Solaris/Illumos, and the Windows NT "kernel" (see the infomation about Gentoo Prefix at the link I gave). In practice, although many of the "latter" 150 packages do not build yet out-of-the-box in the "prefix" setting, we already know they essentially do --- since this works for the Sage distribution. And the remaining 50 packages or so do not sound as to be an unsurmountable obstacle (looking closely, the "hard" ones are either in the base system or in the sage-on-gentoo overlay, so already addressed). As for a better maintanability of the Sage project, the goal would be to start with the 100 packages of the Gentoo Prefix base system, get as many packages as possible into the Gentoo Prefix "full" system (again, say, another 100 or more of the 250), and maintain only an as slim as possible "sage-on-gentoo-prefix" overlay, where only the (say, mathematically) really interesting and/or challenging packages remain (three or four dozens in total, not more). In practice however, there are some more obstacles --- e.g. the "rolling releases" nature of Gentoo (and thus Gentoo Prefix), or the currently less-than-perfect support of the latter to relocate its installation (and thus the currently missing ability to create binary distributions, which Sage can do, this is a must-have). But the general direction seems promising to me, and there are more such generic "hosted distibutions" (there does not seem to be a common name for this kind of thing) to choose from, e.g. Nixpkg (see http://nixos.org/nixpkgs/), or the CDL-licensed (which is GPL compatible) AT&T Advanced Software Technologies Open Source Collection (see http://www2.research.att.com/sw/download/), both of which work under Linux, BSD, OS X --- and Windows (where the former relies on Cygwin, and latter on the UWin environment also provided by AT&T under the CDL --- they don't state it on their outdated Webpage, but UWin does work up to and on Windows 7, see their mailing list, and with both MinGW and MS compilers). And since it is such a general approach, it means support of (and ports to), all interesting architectures is essentially only a matter of some (albeight maybe considerable) *initial* efforts, but with very, very low *maintenance* efforts. Anyway, in the Gentoo Prefix case, I did get to compile myself (starting with the Apple gcc v4.01 of the latest available XCode v2.5 for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger) not only a nicely working gcc v4.2 (for the very first time on this system!), but also the respective gfortran compiler, from source each --- and I bet this way works on OS X 10.4, OS X 10.5, OS X 10.6, and oncoming OS X 10.7, be it Intel or PPC (as far as still supported) systems! Cheers, Georg -- 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
