On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 6:48 AM, Bill Hart<[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > I'm trying to open the flint spkg from the recent sage. As per the > instructions I typed: > > tar jxvf flint-1.3.0.p1.spkg > > on sage.math, but it complained: > > bzip2: (stdin) is not a bzip2 file. > tar: Child returned status 2 > tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
Did you try "ls -l flint-1.3.0.p1.spkg"? You undoubtedly extracted a Sage binary, so you're not even looking at an spkg, but an empty placeholder file. We can't ship the actual spkg's in the binary, since that would add 250MB to it. You can download the spkg here: http://sagemath.org/packages/standard/ wget http://sagemath.org/packages/standard/flint-1.3.0.p2.spkg Then tar xvf flint-1.3.0.p2.spkg will work fine. > I still don't understand why the libraries have to be in this spkg > format. Surely it makes more sense for an open source project to have > *all* code accessible easily, i.e. in source form, not packed into > tar.?? files. There is nothing wrong with packing the code in tar balls. This is no less than open than rpm's or deb's or any other bog-standard package format used by open source projects. The problem in this case is that you're being confused by the placeholders in binaries. There is a README.txt in the spkg/ directory, and the very first statement in there explains this (since you weren't the first to be confused): "The directory SAGE_ROOT/spkg/standard contains spkg's. In a source install, these are all Sage spkg files (actually .tar or .tar.bz2 files), which are the source code that defines Sage. In a binary install some of these may be small placeholder files to save space." Also, if you look at the spkg you'll see: wst...@sage:~/build/sage-4.1/spkg$ more standard/mpir-1.2.p4.spkg Placeholder spkg file so this binary version of Sage knows this package version used when installing Sage. again, since you weren't the first to get confused by this. We could go one step further and make the extension of the placeholder .txt: standard/mpir-1.2.p4.txt but this would require rewritting of a lot of the build system, which would probably introduce subtle bugs. > Does anyone else feel the same way about this issue? Is there a > technical reason for using a non-standard spkg format instead of > having the source trees accessible from within the sage source tree? Managing complexity. William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
