Robert, On Jan 24, 5:29 pm, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > On Jan 22, 2010, at 9:31 AM, Dima Pasechnik wrote: > > > Robert, > > the advantage is that it will simplify the *development* of Sage. > > Ironically, I personally find shipping all our dependancies makes > development easier--I don't have to worry about someone else using > different version than I have, and it's easy to look at and, if need > be, patch the source directly.
Well, a side-effect of this is Sage shipping old buggy upstream packages (cf. GAP). > > > Right now lots of stoppers seem to come from upstream packages. > > For porting, yes. Whether or not depending on people to build their > own upstream packages, then dealing with the issuing dependancy issues > is a gain is up for debate. Probably depends on the package. > > > I also do not see a real problem with "specific versions" of > > packages. Somehow, > > all the other open-source math projects seem to be able to manage this > > well, > > e.g. Singular manages to coordinate with GMP. > > As well, lots of things like needlessly tying Sage up to a very > > particular version or > > an environment can be sorted out simply by using autoconf properly... > > Some packages, like GMP, have a well defined and strongly backwards > compatible API. Other packages, like GAP and maxima, aren't even > considered libraries, and freely make changes that are semantically > inconsequential but change how they interact with the "user" (which in > this case is a pexpect interface, not a human who won't notice when a > question is re-phrased). Even when changing versions doesn't give > errors or bad results, often doctests will fail. (For example, the > Debian port fails doctests all over the place, and trac is full of > examples where bumping to a newer upstream version involves non- > trivial work.) Still other packages are arcane, specialized sets of C > files that where the author has little or no interest (or ability) in > getting into or maintaining as part of a mainstream repository archive > (if it would even be accepted). > > I'd love for someone to be able to do apt-get sage, and get a > reasonably modern, fully working version (without too much redundancy > with what's on their system, especially if that helps us get into > debian, etc.) As a concrete goal towards that end, I'd suggest making > a stripped version of sage that omits "easy" packages such as bzip2, > zlib, maybe even gmp/mpir that still passes all doctests, modifying > the prereq script appropriately. this looks like a good start. Dmitrii > > - Robert -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
