On Wednesday, 7 October 2015 18:56:47 UTC+2, bluescarni wrote: > > I agree that's better if they will allow it. But I'm not sure some of the >> things SageMath depends on are even still maintained, let alone do all >> projects have the resources to keep maintaining such things, which is >> eventually what they get asked to do. Moreover, not all developers feel >> equally warm and fuzzy when you mention Windows. Some people are positively >> against supporting Windows. So what I am suggesting is a pragmatic >> compromise. And based on what I've seen with Pari, it works quite well. (I >> am sorry, I just haven't had the chance to look up when this porting work >> was done and how often it has been maintained, but I think it was something >> like 2008 or 2010 and with zero maintenance since, and it still works >> today). >> > > I think we risk of mixing different things up. One thing is actively > supporting a Windows port from the point of view of build systems, > providing binary packages, and so on (which people might or might not want > to do due to personal inclinations, time/effort tradeoffs, etc.), another > thing is code quality. The issue above with PARI, for instance, was > affecting Linux x32 as well and it is just poor engineering in general. > > I think that a high-quality project not providing support for on a OS as a > "first-class citizen" is fixable with relatively little effort, even if > upstream is not cooperative. To some extent, that is what the packagers of > linux distributions do. But it becomes orders of magnitude more difficult > if the project relies on platform-dependent system calls, libraries, or if > it just happens to work only on specific arch/OS setups. > > Personally I don't care about Windows or OSX as a user, but I make sure my > software does compile and run properly on those platforms as a matter of > code quality. Also, as you pointed out, it helps a lot if one starts doing > this early in the development. >
Those are fair comments. But I'm not talking about the theoretical possibility of maybe thinking about Windows support. I'm actually right now building and using software on Windows. What I'm trying to get started is a discussion about SageMath actually supporting Windows. There's no practical way that can happen if we just decide that it's poor software engineering to not support a variety of OS's and that the reason nothing happens on Windows is because Sage picked a whole pile of dependencies that were designed by people who were poor software engineers. That won't lead to a practical solution to the problem. Sage is clearly not going to decide that these projects should no longer be used and kick them out. We are stuck with the choices that were made, for better or for worse (though I have personally learned a lot from the mistakes that have been made!) As upstream packages are sometimes quite hostile to the idea of supporting Windows the proper way, it's clearly not pragmatic to impose the responsibility of fixing the problem on them. And experience shows they won't even accept the patches if you do it yourself. The only practical solution in such instances is to do the patching in an automated way. You most certainly do not want to have an ongoing maintenance burden. Bill. -- 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.
