Dear list, It has been proposed that we could use the system's version of some utilities in order to lighten Sage's weight.
Case in point : R ceased recently to provide its own version of xz, curl and pcre, which we must now either provide or add to Sage's prerequisites list. - Providing R's prerequisites has the advantage of being consistent : one could install a Sage binary without having to install those prerequisites first. On the other hand, we could duplicate unnecessarily existing functionality. Nevertheless, that is currently our policy : for example, we install R and Maxima whether or not they are present systemwide... - One could install them conditionally to not being present systemwide, avoiding duplication : see this thread <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sage-devel/9gun2Wo6zGM> for an example. But we loose the consistency. - The Sage list is quite short, and is essentially a list of what is necessary to bootstrap Sage successfully : we do not necessarily rely on the system's version,as illustrated by gcc case : we use the system's version to bootstrap, but install our own if necessary. Adding non-bootstrap prerequisites to this list is a break of our current policy. But it can lighten the resulting installation. In the case in point, xz has been packaged (Trac#21063 <https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/21063>) as an optional package ; curl is in the process of being packaged (Trac#21767 <https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/21767>) and a (trivial) packaging of pcre is under way. The question is what to do with such prerequisites : - install them unconditionnaly - install them if not present and sufficient systemwide - add them to Sage's prerequisites What is your advice ? -- Emmanuel Charpentier -- 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.
