On Wednesday, April 26, 2023 at 12:33:13 PM UTC-7 William Stein wrote: On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 12:27 PM David Roe <roed...@gmail.com> wrote: > I do think it would be valuable for other people on this list to offer some thoughts on whether Sage should prioritize reducing the number of foundational packages we offer in the short term (as Dima is advocating) or keeping them to help maintain support (as Matthias is advocating).
Regarding your question David, I really like the way it is phrased, since whether or not to support packages is a function of the resources we have, which really is a function of the community and their availability to work on things. [...] Actually the question happens to mischaracterize my position. I'm in favor of removing unmaintained packages from our distribution when there are *real* problems. For example, I pushed for removing the R package because it was long outdated and nobody was stepping up to take care of it and much better ways to install it than we offered. But the python3 package (and the gcc/gfortran package, which Dima brought up again in https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/LWKdRM2Gn-s/m/GAuPgzCACwAJ above) have concrete purposes of platform support and ease of install. And these packages do not have a *real* maintenance problem. (I have maintained them since 2020.) So demanding that we need to drop these packages is attempting to manage my time, which is not necessary. Moreover, the question poses a false dichotomy; there is a third option. Quoting my key message from that very sage-devel thread from 2 years ago (https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/NfUKjAaTcUg/m/GLMxIirPAwAJ (link to message)): > If we say that availability of gfortran in any of these user-installable distributions is the solution, then this applies to lots of other spkgs as well --- perhaps to ALL of our non-Python packages. > So essentially it is to say, let's stop maintaining the Sage distribution. > > This certainly *could* make sense for the project -- but a lot of work is needed to bring missing packages to these distributions: conda-forge does not have all of our optional packages, homebrew is missing a lot of packages. On the Sage side, also working on the tasks https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/30914 (creating proper upstreams for some Sage-specific packages) will help. > > The big problem is that the middle ground between "Complete Sage distribution that works in most use cases" and "No Sage distribution" is worse than both of the extremes. By removing spkgs one by one, we would make the Sage distribution less useful. So this is not a meaningful process. My 2023 summary of the situation: 1. I would be in favor of abandoning the Sage distribution (despite the fact that I have certainly put a lot of time and energy into it) **if** it is determined that the user community is sufficiently served by conda-forge packaging. But I think that this would require for more developers to engage with the conda-related issues (example: https://github.com/sagemath/sage/issues/35528). 2. I'm not in favor of chipping away 1 package at a time in the name of unsubstantiated, vague notions that a package is "ballast slowing down Sage's progress". -- 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/ffb0b1f4-a143-46df-b65f-b9ac3ad3e70dn%40googlegroups.com.
