On May 26, 2017 23:49, "William Stein" <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 6:01 AM, Erik Bray <erik.m.b...@gmail.com> wrote: [...] > The extent and scope to which Sage "vendors" its dependencies, in the > form of what some call "sage-the-distribution", is *not* particularly > normal in the open source world. Vendoring *some* dependencies is not > unusual, but Sage does nearly all (even down the gcc, in certain > cases). I've learned a lot of the history to this over the past year, > and agree that most of the time this has been done with good reasons. > > For example, I can't think of any other software that forces me to > build its own copy of ncurses just to build/install it. This was Maybe Anaconda? https://anaconda.org/anaconda/ncurses The approach in Sage is indeed very rare, but it's interesting that another similar situation is with another big Python computing stack (Anaconda), which was developed independently. In any case, it's worth mentioning Anaconda in the proposal. I didn't really think of Anaconda since it's not a single software application like Sage. As a self-contained packing system of course most packages included in Anaconda are of this nature. But of course Anaconda doesn't necessarily distribute *everything* it needs to work either. ncurses sort of makes sense to include since a buggy ncurses can be a real deal-breaker for UX. My favorite bugbear in Sage is its inclusion of patch. I wince every time I start a fresh build of Sage and it starts compiling patch. I'm sure there was a good reason for it, and it's very minor in the grand scheme of things, but I think points quite obvious for a need to have better control over what we can use from the system. Best, Erik -- 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.
