On 27 November 2012 09:58, Simon King <simon.k...@uni-jena.de> wrote: > Hi David,
Hi Simon. > On 2012-11-27, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: >> I feel the way to solve this is to have community contributed >> packages, which don't form part of the core of Sage, but can be >> installed by anyone if they wish to. Projects like R, Perl, autoconf >> all have this. > > What is wrong with Sage's experimental or optional packages? Or > (analogously) with the packages of GAP, that also come with different > degrees of "official" support/approval. > > OK, Sage does not have *that* many experimental/optional packages. There's no real search facility like I indicated with Perl. It's just a list in alphabetical order. At the moment, if you are a developer and want to add a bit of code to the sage library to do X or Y, it seems like pretty much anything can be added, as long as it is reviewed properly. > Later in your post, you stated (if I understand you correctly) that it > may be a step forward to *not* just add new stuff to the sage library, > hence, *not* to add it to the default distribution, and instead create > a new spkg for new stuff. I believe there is an argument that is something is not going to be used by many. it should not be in the default distribution. There are 26015 packages available for Python http://pypi.python.org/pypi which one can install. Do you think Python would be better if all those packages were built in? Personally I don't think so. > * Imagine that stuff like integer programming would not be in the sage > library, but only available as an optional package. Then, there will > quite likely be users saying: "Sage does not even have integer > programming", being unaware that all what they need to do is install > yet another optional package. Obviously you need to have a core set of code which is needed to make a package useful. As a non-mathmatician, I have no idea how useful integer programming is, or how many people use it. But if it is useful to wide range of people, then include it in the Sage library. R, Perl, Python, MATLAB all have an extensive range of external packages which the developers don't include in the core of the program. Sage is pretty unique in basically bundling everything together. I do understand some of the reasons for that design choice, but it basically means none of the Linux distributions will include a Sage package. Dave -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
