On 03/02/12 12:47, William Stein wrote: > > By "Gentoo" do you mean "Gentoo prefix" [1] everywhere in this message?
Not really. The "Prefix" project is just a way to run portage (the package manager) out of a non-root directory. So, for example, you could install the Prefix copy of portage in $HOME/usr/portage, and have all of your packages installed under $HOME/usr/bin, $HOME/usr/share, etc. as opposed to /usr/portage, /usr/bin, and /usr/share. It's not much of a simplification to say that "Gentoo" is just "Gentoo Prefix" running out of /. Any fix committed to portage is automatically a part of both Gentoo installations and Prefix -- they're the same repository. What separates them is keywording. Every package has "keywords" that specify for which architectures the package exists or is stable. The prefix project has its own keywords, and nothing gets marked "unstable" or "stable" until someone has actually tested it in a prefix installation. Naturally, there are fewer people using Prefix than normal Gentoo installs. Therefore, fewer packages get tested and marked stable. > Does it concern you that the support matrix at [1] gives a seemingly low mark > "ok" (instead of good/excellent) for many important Sage platforms? These marks most-likely refer to the number of packages (as a portion of the total in portage) that work on Prefix for that architecture. So in a way, it doesn't matter for us: if Sage and all of its dependencies build, we have everything we need. On the other hand, the fact that there are fewer packages for one architecture means that there are probably fewer developers and users for that arch, so it might be harder to get a package stabilized in preparation for a Sage release. In practice, it's usually pretty easy to get things keyworded for Prefix. Since the package already works on normal Gentoo installs, most of the "real" problems are already known. You just have to make sure it doesn't hard-code paths before it can be enabled in Prefix. If a few sage developers become Gentoo developers, this problem goes away entirely. > Do you think Gentoo prefix really and completely solves the problems > you have with Sage being distributed monolithically? It does solve all of the problems I've thought of, but I probably haven't thought of them all. If it would be useful to create a list, I'm willing to explain how Gentoo/Prefix solves (or doesn't) those problems. > [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/ > -- 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
