Hi, so far, three distinct topics evolved in this thread:
1. Make Sage not needing a C compiler, when one changed only .py files and then types "sage -b". That's the topic of trac #12365 (see the original post), and up to now, I read only supportive comments (to which I say +1 also). 2. Discussion of using the "LLVM-backend gcc" (or even the Clang compiler itself, which amounts to almost to the same) versus using the "FSF- backend gcc" for Sage, at least on OS X. 3. Make Sage on OS X independent of having XCode installed. I'll concentrate on this second and third points. FWIW, on my OS X 10.7.2 partition I was able to build Sage-4.8 using the "FSF-backend" gcc (using the R project's gcc42 package alluded to above), and a ptestlong run only showed doctest failures in three files (for which I failed to make up trac tickets up to now). William had reported these failures (all seem to be numerical noise) elsewhere in another thread for some "LLVM-backend gcc" OS X 10.7 test build of his. But there he reported also failures in "interrupt.pyx", which I didn't see with the "FSF-backend gcc" build of mine. IMHO, Sage should be able to rely on either GCC (FSF-flavour) or else Clang --- we really shouldn't target the "LLVM-flavour gcc", since support of this might go away soon. The LLVM project says e.g. that as of their current 3.0 release, "llvm-gcc is no longer supported" (see http://llvm.org/releases/3.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html), and Apple also seems determined to replace it with Clang as soon as possible. This leaves three alternatives: a) Stay with the old "FSF-flavor" Apple version of gcc v4.2.1 "build 5666.3", as has been included in XCode 3.2.6, 4.0. and 4.1 (but no longer from 4.2 onwards), and that gcc42 package. b) Use newer FSF gcc's on OS X, e.g. gcc-4.4 (with the benefit of the possibility to use an up-to-date gfortran also). c) Support building Sage with Clang (BTW, that's a general theme, which is not restricted to OS X at all!) --- but both gfortran and g95 seem to rely on the FSF gcc backends. Does any one know the status of building some fortran compiler with/relying on nothing but Clang (should be possible, since usually Fortran code is translated to C code first, and only then compiled)? Note that this still says next to nothing about point 3) above (getting independent of XCode). If one wants to build Sage from source on OS X, one needs not only "make" and such (which a vanilla OS X 10.7 install does not provide), but also certain library headers (which e.g. on Debian would be in those "dev"-packages), and the like. I'm not sure whether there is any solution for that available yet. (Both MacPorts and Gentoo Prefix seem to require XCode at least for bootstrapping themselves.) Especially when interfacing with Cocoa/graphics is concerned (Python itself does this, matplotlib, R, i.e. several non-trivial components of Sage), the respective headers are needed, and it may very well be that only XCode provides these in a "neatly downloadable" way (those "SDKs"). One could patch all these parts out of Sage (they are "OS X only" parts, after all, so Sage runs certainly without). I did that once to get Sage building in 64bit on OS X 10.4 (for which those Cocoa parts are supported only in 32bit), so it is definitely possible --- but it's not some "minor" effort to get this ready for "prime-time" mainline Sage releases, as you certainy want "plot" to show something (maybe we would need Qt, or another alternative to Cocoa/Aqua graphics)! I'd modestly suggest staying with the requirement of XCode for building Sage from source on OS X (merely using Sage, and doing Sage library development, is something different, though). 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
