On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 10:54 PM, leif <not.rea...@online.de> wrote: > kcrisman wrote: >> >> Make R optional? (Nothing in Sage depends on it, except for the >> interface to it, including Rpy2.) >> >> Gosh, R has been standard for*ever*, practically, > > Hört sich nach Schwäbischem Dreiklang an. > > >> and is often heavily >> advertised as a good reason to use Sage. There are certainly many who >> have been using them together (as mentioned, obviously nowhere near the >> number of "pure" R users, but still we definitely get queries about this >> regularly) > > Well, I guess the ratio of R-thru-Sage users to Sage users is as > "negligible" as that to pure R users. ;-) > > I know of exactly /one/ person who reported errors concerning R because > he was using (or trying to use) R; all others just had build issues > (some also doctest failures) with R, and just because it was/is a > standard package. > > >> and of course optional=untested=broken all too often. > > While that's true to some extent, I'd say you confuse cause and effect > here. If hardly anybody is interested in a package, it will presumably > rotten with time, orthogonal to what its type is (except that build and > test issues with /standard/ packages bug every developer and user, no > matter whether anybody actually uses them). > > What happened to the role of an spkg maintainer by the way? > > >> Take >> the Maple or Mathematica interfaces and their on-again, off-again >> nature... > > If I'm not mistaken, Sage never shipped Maple nor Mathematica, nor have > there ever been optional packages of them, unfortunately. (So we had no > influence on which version was used either, besides that most developers > and buildbots simply couldn't test, not to mention develop further.) > > Also, Rpy wasn't invented by Sage, and is developed independently by others. > > >> Is this only a Cygwin problem, or on other platforms? I >> couldn't see anything about other problems on this thread. > > Wait and see. The prerequisites R removed from its tarball certainly > won't be present on every system. We'd at least have to make them > explicit prerequisites for building Sage(!) if we keep R standard, > despite (my impression being) that only few people at all need Sage's R.
I think almost any dependency that Sage-the-Python-package can work without should be considered "optional" insofar as installing Sage is concerned. I think it's fine for it to be a stadard part of Sage-the-Distribution. But this gets almost off-topic and in to my preference that Sage development make a stronger distinction between those two things. End of the day though, I should be able to install Sage-the-Python-package with as few dependencies as possible in order to use it to build applications and code directly on Sage. Whereas Sage-the-Distribution is more of an end-user thing (in fact I think the OS packaging would do well to make this distinction as well--have a minimal Sage that works, but doesn't necessarily support *all* features, plus a sage-full that is more of a metapackage including all possible dependencies. -- 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.
