On 02/20/2015 11:02 AM, kcrisman wrote: > >> >> I no longer use sage for my day-to-day work, but when I was and I had to >> e.g. give a presentation, it was infuriating to find sage broken AGAIN >> > > ??? I assume this is because you updated some dependency and Sage didn't > work quite properly somewhere in its bowels with that? I've never once had > that happen with Sage on Mac, since it is a distribution by necessity > there. To me that sounds like an argument for installing > sage-the-distribution, because I assume this could happen with any software > that has a dependency, before upstream had repackaged based on that updated > dependency. I may be misunderstanding something in your argument, though. >
It happens when I update something that is a sage dependency, but for which there is no spkg. All of the C code that we ship depends on glibc, but we don't ship an spkg for glibc. When I update glibc, sage begins to segfault until I rebuild every spkg and the sage library. There are two ways to fix that: first, we could bundle literally an entire Linux distribution down to the kernel. Or, we could make sage play nice with package managers and let the package manager reinstall (i.e. rebuild) any parts of sage that are broken by the update. The first solution duplicates an enormous amount of effort that Linux distros have already put forth. It makes the sage download half a gigabyte instead of a few megabytes. It creates security problems -- now I have two version of openssl on my machine, and nobody updates the sage copy. It causes the sage build process to take 4 hours instead of 5 minutes. It makes installation much harder for users who are used to doing "yum install sage". It ensures that system administrators won't go near it, so sage can't be installed once globally on the department server. The second has none of those problems, but we can't depend on "silent forks" of packages. I don't think there are very many packages where we really need to have a full-fledged fork. Pari may be one of them, who knows. But if we need to fork it we should just fork it and rename all of the libs and get it over with. -- 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.
