Hi all, This is a rare rant cross-posted to sage-packaging about one of the annoyance faced by the people packaging sage and not using sage's packaging system.
The functions found in `sage.misc.package` are a result of the fact that sagemath and its development is closely linked to its own packaging system. Stuff from `sage.misc.package` is used in one of three things: 1) Runtime: testing for the presence or finding info about a package. Usually by calling "is_package_installed". Most of this can be all done a different way and will hopefully be addressed by https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/20382 2) Doctest time: currently testing with "-optional=all" relies on `sage.misc.package` to establish the list of options to be tested. 3) Build time: it is used to figure if some optional binding can be build. The way it is done is generally called "automagic", that is build if detected. This would be better replaced by some configuration tool. At the moment only replacement for (1) is actively worked on. This is the most harmful bit from the distro point of view. (3) can be dealt with in an "ad hoc" way. (2) is probably the toughest problem. In the meantime what I would like to discuss is that from my point of view we shouldn't be introducing new runtime call to sage.misc.package if it can be easily avoided before #20382 gets finalized. I am starting this debate because of discussion I had earlier in #22670. It was pointed out to me that there was no policy of avoiding `sage.misc.package` and I would very much want one. Francois sage-on-gentoo dev. -- 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.
