Hi, To what extent does or could Conda with a little more work solve most of these problems? There are some notes below from me poking around, and I'm very optimistic.
I looked at https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/conda.html and I would love some further discussion of that and whether with enough help it could be viable. For example, on my M1 mac I just tried what seems to me to be the most obvious first thing to do based on the instructions: (base) wstein@max ~ % mamba create -n sage sage python=3.11 and it fails with "└─ sage is uninstallable because there are no viable options" Obviously I'm going to nex try "mamba create -n sage sage", which works, but that's not what our docs say to do. Incidentally, it took about a minute to download and install everything (and took 5.8GB disk instead of the 3GB disk of the Sage mac app). Then a few minutes of me being confused if I should do "mamba activate sage" or "conda activate sage", and finally I typed "sage" and strangely it just shows nothing at all while it mysteriously takes about a minute for sage to start the first time (on my M1 max laptop with SSD). Sage then starts and works fine. Subsequent sage startups are very fast (e.g., 1 second). What is it doing that first time, and why is it silent? It's very unnerving. I also think this section https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/conda.html#using-conda-to-provide-all-dependencies-for-the-sage-library-experimental called "Using conda to provide all dependencies for the Sage library (experimental)" is pretty exciting! For many years when I gave talks about Sage, I had a slide: "What is Sage", with two points: 1. A distribution of open source math software 2. A new library tying everything together I definitely only started 1 out of necessity because nothing existed at the time. My hope is that at this point in time conda is good enough that maybe it could totally solve 1, and we can focus on 2? In any case, I think that migrating from "Sage the distribution" to solving a lot of the misc environment issues via conda would be very analogous to switching to Github, instead of maintaining our own issue tracker. I.e., if you want the latest version of sage on Ubuntu 22.04 (say), then our recommendation is "use conda", and we put effort into making Sage-via-conda extremely good. If you want some random version of sage, then you can use system packages. For CoCalc.com, the key thing we need is a way to have self-contained stable installations of sage-9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, 9.6, 9.7, 9.8, 10.0, etc. all on the same Ubuntu system, all at once, and have them not get screwed up when we do normal system updates. Doing major Ubuntu version updates (e.g., 20.04 --> 22.04) doesn't have to be supported. My impression is that conda potentially solves this problem at least as well as sage-the-distribution does right now. -- William PS Thanks again to the people who put so much work into packaging sage and its dependencies for conda! On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 5:12 AM kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > As of today, it is plausible that such situations still exist. > > > I am wondering about such situations existing in less-resourced areas > globally (which would include less-resourced parts of developed countries). > One big advantage of Sage-the-distribution historically was the ability to > make USB drives that had the complete thing (maybe also a Linux VM?) on them, > from which one could boot. > > It strikes me that many arguments for removing the distribution along these > lines (not the developer side, which is also important) are akin to those > arguments which assume one should "just" use a remote option for Sage at all > times. Yes, that has been seriously made on multiple occasions, though > usually not on this list. But even "post-pandemic" there are still plenty of > reliable high-speed internet deserts even where I live on the US East Coast, > much less around the world. I wouldn't want to use CoCalc without a fairly > new computer. > > Likewise, there are plenty of people using 5-10 year old computers who, in > principle, could be afforded Sage access, but for our continued upgrading. > (Again, see below for the developer side.) Arguments about how they should > upgrade or face security issues are fine, but in practice (whether for > financial or other reasons) this is not how humans respond to those > incentives, and presumably at least some of them might benefit from Sage. A > lot of the paradigm discussed on this list (but not all, for sure) focuses SO > MUCH on people who have access to fairly recent technology, and that simply > doesn't obtain. > > As an example, how old of a Windows computer could one install the current > Sage on? I mean from scratch - not necessarily from source - using WSL, > which I guess is now the main supported way to do so? What about the Cygwin > installer - does it still exist in older versions on sagemath.org mirrors, > what does that support? How easy is it for someone who does NOT know about > compiling to install Sage on a not-too-recent Windows machine? I bet it's > easy to install the various M's ... > > In any case, it would be very helpful for people who may be actively using > Sage in less-resourced environment to chime in here. > > Moving to the developer side: > > a) If a critical bug is discovered, we can patch it and don't have to rely on > people and infrastructure "outside the project" to fix things for us. > Of course, we have been very lucky that packagers for many distributions have > been consistently highly engaged with the project; but this is not something > that we can take for granted. > > > This is basically why William started Sage in the first place. (Well, one > reason!) When I still had time to be an active developer, this was a major > source of necessary work. It's true that a lot of packages are now more > responsive (or have been canned/subsumed into Sage), but presumably it could > still be a problem, especially with some extremely math-specific packages > that might not regularly update in a platform-agnostic way. That said, > presumably Python and gcc are no longer in the situation where we need to > actively maintain a lot of patches to them. > > > b) And, of course, more Sage developers can become contributors to the > packaging communities; but there is the real danger that taking care of both > upstream development *and* downstream packaging for the same project can lead > to developer burnout. > > > This (whether connected to upstream packaging or not) is really the most > powerful argument for radical decoupling. (Similarly to the GH transition.) > Clearly R fell in this category. Reading the other thread did not really > clarify for me whether python3 or gcc fell into this category, and I don't > think it will be helpful to revisit that right now. In any case, this should > be weighed against Sage ease of access. > > One thing that might help all of this is having older versions of Sage > *binaries* for such platforms readily available for download (as many of our > upstream packages in fact do). I don't think we are. In fact, > https://www.sagemath.org/mirrors.html was kind of scary - a lot of mirrors > don't seem to have anything at all. I will assume I missed a thread (quite > likely that I did) that we were dropping binary support via mirrors > completely, which needless to say would make my suggestion difficult to > implement. I do think it is the best way to provide quite fully-featured > versions of Sage to people with less-modern setups (who probably now simply > don't use Sage because they can't, or stick with older versions they already > have, which we see from time to time on the support list) while still > allowing for dropping some of this support when it sucks up too much > developer effort. > > -- > 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/8b0c2df5-c3be-406c-a1fd-fd0506e5f946n%40googlegroups.com. -- William (http://wstein.org) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. 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