I agree with Robert. And from an enduser point of view I think that being one large bundle is actually on of the key strength's of sage. I have had some open source programs which I didn't start using because after having to hand compiling the third dependancy I thought it wasn't worth the effort. It's just a fact that a lot of things on which sage depend are not easy (ie. without hand compiling) available on all platforms that sage supports. I've even know some people who just installed sage (who weren't interested in sage but just in one of it's dependancy's) because that was easier then to get one of the thing on which sage depends installed.
As Robert said, from some points of view sage is more like a distrubution then just another math program. And I don't think sage is doing something really odd an unconventional as you say, the principle behind the .spkg files is sort of the same as Red Hat's .rpm or Debians .deb files. And apparently other people thought the .spkg idea is a good one since http://www.femhub.org/codes.php also uses it. Of course the .spkg system could be modified to make it easier to use your own version of Gap, pari, singular, etc... But I personally don't care and it seems like a lot effort. And in the open source world things only get done if people care enough to do it themselves. What I do (and I guess I am not the only one) care about is that a "batteries included" version of sage will always remain available so I don't have to go through the fuzz of getting all dependancy's working. -- 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
