Hi! Reading the dev guide at http://sagemath.org/doc/developer/, I find that I'm missing a relevant piece of information: how to obtain the sources and start using all these commands in the first place.
For most packages, I use a binary installation (compiled from source since I'm on Gentoo, but that doesn't matter). When I encounter a bug, I start looking for the source code repository, grab a checkout, ake sure I'm at the most recent version, build it and then start fixing the bug. With sage, things are less clear to me. I could start with a binary install (but not the one sage-on-gentoo installed system-wide), or I could grab a source tarball, or I could do the checkout as above. But which of these to choose isn't specified. I could use the latest release, but the latest development beta would seem more appropriate when fixing a bug which might interact with recent modifications. The link to beta versions is pretty well hidden, at least good enough that I couldn't find it yet. I know a URL, http://sagemath.org/download-latest.html, but at least the German mirror there is still at 6.1.beta1. I only found http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/release/ and the 6.2.beta5 tarball there by accident, which makes me wonder whether using that is appropriate. When starting from a git checkout, there is a similar difference between the master and the development branch. Which should I choose? I only noticed the development branch after John Cremona wrote about it. It would be very great if the documentation could outline the basic steps required to get the latest (or suggested) version up and running. That could include pointers at how to build sage from source, together with the URL of the git repository and the command needed to clone it. But it could also be something else. You might also want to indicate how to get up to the latest version from a previously created setup. Do I “git pull” and “./sage -upgrade”, followed by “make” and “./sage -b”? Or some other sequence of commands? Or should I rather branch off from some well-defined tag, instead of the version which just happens to be the tip of the development branch? Sage installs several third party packages into its tree, and recently I had a situation where a tree became completely unusable since make simply failed. On a clean tree, I'd have considered this a problem with my build environment, perhaps a bug. As it was, I'm thinking that an incomplete or outdated version of some third party package is a far more likely cause. And I started over with a fresh install from a source tarball for the latest beta. But perhaps a clean tree command would have been sufficient. If so, you might consider documenting “git clean -x” that along with the instructions of how to obtain the sources in the first place and how to update them. I hope I got the right list for this kind of request, and I hope you can add a suitable section to the top of the dev guide. Thanks for reading, Martin von Gagern -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
