On Tuesday, November 27, 2012 4:59:14 AM UTC-5, Simon King wrote: > > Hi David, > > On 2012-11-27, David Kirkby <david....@onetel.net <javascript:>> 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. > > The difference is that most R packages are continually tested and are not accepted on CRAN without actually fairly stringent requirements that they work with R (and they always have a minimum version that they work with, with an intelligible error message if not). There are other R repositories that are less stringent, and the R community knows what stuff is what. The Sage community is probably a couple of orders of magnitude smaller, and has a lot fewer auto build resources, so we are nowhere near there. As I pointed out somewhere, we don't even have an automated test of each release with all optional packages on the various platforms (I think that Jeroen and William occasionally do this by hand, though).
But in general having a well-designed way to include research code as optional packages that could be injected into a contrib/ or something folder, as a lot of people have suggested, could work. Of course, Maxima basically includes all its contrib code, and sometimes it is not as easy to figure out as the ordinary stuff either, but I doubt there is a perfect point here. How hard would it be to "import contrib.foo as modular.foo" without causing problems? Because of course one wouldn't want one's research stuff to have to live in a different namespace if it was for Sage proper stuff. > OK, Sage does not have *that* many experimental/optional packages. > -- 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.
