On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 5:59 AM, Julien Puydt <julien.pu...@laposte.net>wrote:
> Le 05/11/2011 21:24, Justin C. Walker a écrit : > > There are so many different versions of each library and system (for >> Linux, in particular) >> that it's a practical impossibility to produce a package like Sage that >> will work on the systems currently supported. >> > > I would like to point out that quite a few distributions have some sort of > rolling-release organisation, where some packages are updated within a huge > set with complex deps. It works. > > And I'm not just discussing linux distributions : there are a few *BSD out > there too, and I think there are distributions for Sun, OSX and win32 too. > > So I think it's definitely practical and possible to produce a package > like sage that will work on the systems currently supported, and more. > Because it has been done. > > Any of the many debian packages I have on my system has a list of deps. > Each sage spkg has deps. Where is the difference? Why would it be > impossible to "apt-get install sagemath", "yum install sagemath", "emerge > sagemath" and have the right thing be done? > > I can't understand why you think sage is different. > I don't know enough about software packaging to know if sage is _really_that different, but it is quite complicated and large, and it may take a big coordinated effort to get sage into every different distributions package management. And sage needs to work on old releases. It is possible to update mpfr on Ubuntu 8.04 without adding an extra repository? But anyway, the main reason I'm writing is that I've seen these type of comments many times, and I think you are missing that having everything included is, to many people, one of the great features of sage. Sage might be large, but it is completely trivial to download and compile, and it is not much harder to start developing. And it is also completely trivial to do this whether or not you have root access on the machine that you are using. Here is a short story: Not long ago I wanted to use mercurial on a machine where I have an account, but no root access. I'm sure I could have asked the sysadmin to install it, but it was probably not during business hours, and maybe it was even on a weekend. "Well, it should be easy enough to install it myself in my home directory", I thought. Not so fast, though --- mercurial needed some python source files in order to compile, and this machine doesn't have the python development packages installed. So I suppose I can just download those, but wait, it also needs... 30 minutes later, mercurial is still not installed, and I'm getting frustrated, but then I realize that _sage_ includes mercurial. So I download sage, type 'make', and sit back and wait. So I am asserting that the easiest way to install mercurial, if you don't have root access, is to download and compile sage. And a little later, when I realized that the system-installed mpfr is so old that it doesn't have mpfr_mul_d(), my first reaction again was that I should download and compile mpfr, but first I need gmp (or should I get mpir instead, and then deal with compiling it in gmp compatibility mode?), and gmp needs.... Or, of course, I can just add -I/home/bober/sage/local/include and -L/home/bober/sage/local/lib to my makefiles. So I am asserting that the easiest way to install mpfr, if you don't have root access, is to download and compile sage. And the same goes for just about every other package included in sage. For many of us, sage is not just a 'program'. It is distribution of lots of the software that we want to use, and many people have done a wonderful job of making it so that it is usually completely trivial to install, and also to modify, even without root access. So if someone wanted to go do lots of work just so that I can type 'apt-get install' instead of 'make', that would be fine with me, but I think it would be missing the point; and if it interfered with the current simple build process, it would be a step backwards for me. -- 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
