On Monday 24 August 2009 21:21:28 Dr. David Kirkby wrote: > Bill Hart 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 > > That looks right to me, I'm not sure why it does not work for you. > > > 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. > > > > 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? > > > > Bill. > > I agree with you 100% Bill. > > I can see the .spkg format saves on the disk space requirements, as only > a small fraction of the code is decompressed at any one time. > > But it has lots of problems I feel. Take my recent post: > > What keeps calling 'top' and 'grep' ? > > I can see from the processes being created that something is calling > 'top -b -n' thousands of times. Had Sage been distributed as a big > tar.bz2 file, I could extract that, and then use a recursive grep to > find 'top -b -n'. > > But it is much more difficult to do things like this in the spkg format. > I've also noticed some times, that despite running > > $ ./sage -sh > > I am unable to make changes to some packages in a sensible way, so I end > up creating a new .spkg just to test some changes. > > I'd personally much rather see the Sage code was distributed as a more > conventional .tar.gz or .tar.bz2. >
It is , the .spkg is just a empty wrapper(it's SO empty , it's just a rename) , so (I assume) we can upgrade someday to a more compact format eg lzma , and still call it a *.spkg > > Dave > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
