several Linux distributions carry reasonably up to date binary Sage installations (and these can be installed on various VMs, e.g. on Windows’ WSL, ChromeOS’ Crostini, etc)
For example current LinuxMint and WSL are both on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS which gives you Sage 9.0 (as in the example I’ve mentioned above). To get Sage 9.5 you need Ubuntu 22.04 (I guess not very widespread at the moment). My point is the following: until we discontinued the binary tarballs, the straight ahead way to a Sage installation for Ubuntu systems lead you to the current release. This is broken, now. The installation manual for 9.6 will look like this: https://6212659123a9467b3cb0cd07--sagemath-tobias.netlify.app/installation/index.html There’s a decision tree. Looks good. But, according to your sentence: I agree, we should update our documentation to warn people about wildly outdated distribution packages on outdated OS distributions, and steer users to using conda-forge. I would have expected that the *no root access* question comes first and perhaps reads like this: *no root access or older OS distribution*. All - https://www.sagemath.org/ now has a revised Download menu - please take a look. No doubt, this improves the situation a lot! But I think someone visiting our web-page the first time will rather push the *big blue button Download 9.5* instead of going to the download menu especially if he wants to be sure to get the current release. This launches this page <https://www.sagemath.org/download.html>. But the chance to receive the promised release from there went down tremendously since we discontinued the binary tarballs. Don’t get me wrong: I completely understand that we don’t continue the tarballs for maintenance reasons, but I think there are further adaptions needed. kcrisman schrieb am Dienstag, 26. April 2022 um 14:15:51 UTC+2: > If we're moving away from providing binaries, then this is a good way to > go, well organized. Below a few minor notes about the sagemath-tobias > link, I hope they are helpful. My apologies in advance for any bike > shedding, though I tried to be pretty concrete. > > 1. Is it possible to have a short bullet list for the three/four options > * Linux > * Mac > * Windoze > * Cloud > that link to those, immediately below "Where would you like to run > SageMath?"? I'm pretty sure Sphinx makes that possible. Even a little bit > of needed scrolling leads to people just not caring. > > 2. I'd also recommend Linux be last - this page is designed for people who > are not comfortable installing source software, I guess. (Similarly, no > development as first option?) > > e. Alternately, one could have the first decision point be "develop or > not" - that would be my preference, but obviously would be an annoying bit > of work with perhaps not that much marginal gain. Still, that seems to be > the great divide in Sage, not so much platform, and would allow for people > who want to just use Sage in the cloud to see that option very early. It's > not like people on (say) Windows don't also use the cloud, so the four-way > partition could be somewhat misleading to less careful readers (which many > internet users are when in a hurry) in practice, though of course not in > principle. > > 3. Do the binaries/packaging allow for all optional packages and/or using > Cython/Fortran? I recall this coming up not only on this list, but also > sometimes when I've tried to show people Cython usage as a "great feature" > of Sage that doesn't work in some environments. If the answer to any of > these is not, you might need another part of the decision tree, or at least > a link to something about optional packages in each "no development" part. > > 4. A link to some Windows doc on what WSL is would probably be pretty > helpful, since presumably a lot of Windows users who like doing math have > never heard of it. > -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/d7c62057-9492-43b1-8a14-7892b92b490dn%40googlegroups.com.
