>The main plus of this packaging for sage is that it builds from >source quickly (in a few minutes) using precompiled clisp files.
Well, on my 2Ghz machine with 2 Gig of memory running VMWare and using the sage vmware image (but upgrading the VM to have 1G memory) I started the package-install at 3:30am this morning. It is now 2:10pm and the build is still "in-process". They are heavy things, your minutes :-) Likely a portion of the problem is due to starting the package-install from the notebook. I'm running native windows and sage in the VM and connecting thru the browser. I suspect a lot of CPU is going into running jsMath to redraw the output page. The Fricas build has a lot of output (which could be suppressed during package-install) and jsMath is not fast. Axiom has a NOISE variable in the Makefiles to suppress most output. You might consider a note suggesting that installs be done from inside the virtual machine rather than thru the notebook interface. I didn't realize that package-install was going to try a dynamic fetch and build. Shipping an Axiom source tarball would be faster and cheaper. Three other semi-related comments... Re: Lisp builds: Axiom is designed to be constructed directly "from the lisp" by shipping the pre-built "int" directory which caches all possible machine-generated, system-independent work during builds. This was used to minimize build times on 6 megahertz machines. Fricas uses a different build mechanism so I'm not sure what Waldek does. I'll check to see if Axiom's mechanism has any bugs since I don't use it regularly despite the design point. Re: jsMath: I started using jsMath but Arthur Ralfs modified Axiom to output mathML directly (using )set out mathml). All Axiom needs is a mathml enabled browser with the correct fonts. I found that this is very much faster and lighter-weight than jsMath. The browser has machine code to handle mathml but jsMath is interpreted. You might want to reconsider this design decision because it will impact the long term speed of your notebooks. Arthur (copied on this email) might be able to give some advice. Re: Source Code Control: On a more religious note, it appears the package was downloaded from a mercurial repository (asssuming I understood correctly). After trying many of the repo software packages (cvs, svn, darcs, arch, sourcesafe, but not mercurial) I find that git is blindingly faster than anything else. Git is so fast that when I first started using it I used to refetch the sources to make sure it actually worked. Axiom uses Arch, CVS, SVN, and git but I shadow the other systems from the git master. Git has changed the way I work which is not something that happens often, given that I'm an old curmudgeon. Tim _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
