On Sat, May 27, 2017 at 01:16:39PM +0200, Erik Bray wrote: > All I'm proposing are some very *minor* changes that change little about > how Sage is currently worked on, while still being a quality of life > improvement, in a way.
Hi Erik. that's great news. and it sounds like the way to go, particulary in contrast to what i tried four years ago. (TL;DR; that was a demo of a modified sagelib that worked on a modified sage-the-distribution, as well as on debian -- i made choices, likely too pragmatic, and it went all bikeshed). > In other words, it's something I can do now with maybe a few days of work > instead of a major overhaul of everything. So I'd rather this thread focus > on the details of those minor changes than any big ideas that may or may > not go anywhere. the place where I would start today is just the blacklists. i.e. have toplevel configure flags that allow telling sage-the-distribution not to build spkgs. rather pretend they are "installed" (into $SAGE_LOCAL, as usual) to all other parts. something similar to $ ./configure --disable-patch --disable-ncurses will then effectively fallback to system packages without much more work. note how 4 years back, even the use of PATH was highly controversial. i reckon the situation has improved. the blacklist method will enable anyone (i am thinking of power-users and distributors, conda fans, or myself), to try, and send patches... some of them will be needed. i see the point of having all sorts of magic to determine whether or not a system package substitutes an spkg. (and i partly did some of that kind myself). i do now consider that pointless, way too much work. imo, nowadays, functionality checks should be on package level, and a transition path close to - provide blacklists - switch to system packages, one by one, fix the remaining - eventually reach "./configure --disable-all --enable-sagelib" - use standalone (vanilla) sagelib on gentoo, conda, debian, etcpp - ditch sage-the-distribution for (something similar to) conda seems feasible. at the end, it does not matter much, what spkg -i <name_of_disabled_package> might have done during the transition. keep it simple, print a warning "not supported", and exit 1. regards felix -- 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.
