William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> writes: > On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Aleksej Saushev <a...@inbox.ru> wrote: >> Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> writes: >> >>> On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 6:21 AM, Dr. David Kirkby >>> <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: >>>> >>>> and those changes get put into Sage, without any discussion >>>> of what's actually needed in Sage, and what should be written as an >>>> external >>>> program. >>> >>> I think part of this is due to the historical context in which Sage >>> arose. Pre-Sage, the open source mathematical landscape consisted of a >>> few large pieces (e.g. Pari, Gap, Maxima) and dozens of specialized >>> libraries (gfan, ntl, ...) most of which were hard to build, needed >>> manually managed dependencies, and didn't interoperate with each >>> other. The Sage community is often accused of being full of more >>> mathematicians than programmers, and though to some people manually >>> configuring, compiling, and installing various interdependent >>> libraries is all in a days work this is not what mathematicians enjoy >>> spending their time doing (if they even have the background at all). >> >> FreeBSD ports collection and NetBSD portable pkgsrc exist for a decade >> at least. They make all packages build with "make all", install with >> "make install", and track dependencies. >> >>> Along comes Sage with it's kitchen sink strategy (and a huge amount of >>> hard work to get all these systems to build out of the box) and it's >>> hailed as "the easiest way to get X" for many X which were before only >>> available separately. Since then it's grown as we now have many of >>> these these programs working together, hundreds of thousands of lines >>> of new code, and a (subjectively) nice Python and notebook interface. >> >> Along comes monolythic Sage that can't build on neither major BSD >> platform, even though all principal components are there and Sage >> is written in Python itself. > > That's false. Even if it were true, BSD is largely irrelevant to the > point Robert is making, as it has such a small install base (certainly > less than 0.1% of mathematicians use it).
Oh? Since when does Sage build on FreeBSD? Mathematicians I know don't use Sage, they prefer Mathematica. And when the latter isn't available, they prefer individual tools. I doubt that they reported it to you. -- HE CE3OH... -- 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
