On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 3:01 PM, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> >> The problem, as I see it, is that Sage has built up over the years its >> own ad-hoc packaging system. This is actually really cool, because >> it's what's allowed Sage to be installable on a wide range of >> platforms! I think this happened sort of organically over time, as >> various direct dependencies of Sage couldn't be installed easily on >> some platforms due to poor support for *those* dependencies' >> dependencies and so on. > > Yes yes you are exactly correct. For instance the gcc inclusion is > (largely, not entirely) due to Mac's compiler going down some separate road. > > One issue I haven't seen addressed a lot is when a package manager might > have a different - and, at least for a time, incompatible - version of a > package in Sage. How is that/should that be dealt with? E.g. on gentoo I > think it's "dealt with" by having a very hard-working kiwifb making sure > things work out right :) which however isn't scalable.
This is of course the general problem with dependency management in packaging systems. For the most part I would say this is the problem of the downstream packager, not so much Sage's problem. However, what will often occur, and has occurred on my other projects is that the packager (sometimes is also me but not always) will point out the problem. And then we'll work together to either find a way to update the dependent package, if possible (debian has a great continuous integration platform for testing these kinds of things). Or we'll work together to come up with a patch that can be applied to the *their* Sage package (or whatever other package has the dependency incompatibility). So the issue is kept in the downstream package and doesn't infect the original source. In other words I'm in favor of pushing these kinds of issues downstream as much as possible--it's too much overhead to deal with directly in Sage. That said, I see no reason not to continue with the system Sage has already built up over time, at least for where it's needed. -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
