Robert Bradshaw wrote:
On Jan 27, 2010, at 8:22 AM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
Martin Albrecht wrote:
People often CC me onto tickets to test on Solaris. Unfortunately, I
don't have the time to test every patch on Solaris.
Nor do I. Or test every patch on all of Ubuntu, RedHat, Debian, OS X,
etc. (and soon Cygwin), though building on Solaris seems to be touchier
than most systems. We should put Solaris/OpenSolaris one one of the
build farm VMs at least, so the release manager can bounce patches that
don't work there.
It does not seem unreasonable to check ones patches on Solaris, OS X and one
linux distro. Of course it does not guarantee it will work on every linux
distro, but it would have a reasonable probability of doing so.
I believing have a week after the last release candidate before something is
released would help.
Solaris 10 on SPARC can not go onto a virtual machine. VirtualBox only support
the x86 processors, not SPARC.
Solaris 10 on x86 could be installed in Virtualbox, but I don't know how well
Sage would work on that. My guess is there would be some issues which would need
resolving.
Fortunately the vast majority of patches shouldn't break anything on
this level.
The biggest problem seems to be to the Sage library. That's mainly where there
needs to be more testing on Solaris. The individual .spkg files seem to present
less problem.
There is general documentation on building on Solaris at
http://wiki.sagemath.org/solaris
However, it might be useful to have some very specifically for 't2'.
I'll write some documentation on that and put it on the Wiki. However,
in the short term, the following will set up everything on 't2' properly.
Thanks. I remember wanting to test something on Solaris a while back and
I didn't do it simply because I didn't have a clue how to get a working
Sage on t2, or even start compiling it.
Fair enough. I'll write something on that. But it would be good if I had a
release that I can tell people to build - currently there is no way to get a
successful build on t2 unless I disable the Sun compilers. But the fix for that
is in trac
That and t2 is so slow for
building and testing.
That is I admit very unfortunate. The machine is very badly suited for what it
is being used for. I attended a recent London Open Solaris User Group (LOSUG)
meeting. The speaker was ill, and pulled out at the last minute, so it was
basically a question and answer to Sun employees.
There was univeral agreement the T5240 is not suitable for what we are using it
for.
What was also interesting was the view from many non-Sun employees that 't2'
really flies as a web server, and leaves any Intel box standing. It is simply
not designed for what we are using it for and as such performs very badly.
I'm somewhat fortunate in that I have a faster machine here.
At least you you don't have to get a separate
account for it anymore as of the last Sage days (right?).
I'm not sure. though creating an account was never that difficult. Someone tried
to add NIS support, and failed. I don't know what the latest is on that.
Hence I believe there is some merrit in producing a 4.3.0.1, which has
the one patch needed to get Sage to build irrespective of whether the
Sun compilers are installed. That would avoid users needing root
access to build Sage.
Depending how immediate the need is, could it wait 'till 4.3.2? Or are
you worried something else Solaris will break by then?
There are several reasons I feel a 4.3.0.1 would be desirable.
* I'm worried that the current issue wont be fixed 4.3.2 - it is not obvious to
me what the problem is. It's in the Sage library somewhere. I don't understand
that well enough, but with auto generated code, it is less easy to understand.
There were tons of patches in that release, so that makes the task even more
difficult.
* With something that worked, I could produce some instructions which allow
someone to build Sage on 't2', without taking the step of disabling compilers.
It would then be relatively easy for someone to build Sage on t2 and in most
cases check their changes would be easy to test.
* It would be good to have a release that worked, so Solaris users could use
it. I know some at Sun are quite keen to use it. Saying it works if Sun Studio
is not installed is not very nice. Most people will have that installed, and
most wont have the ability to disable it, as it needs root access.
* William was asked recently by Sun whether there was anything they could
point users at.
If you
volunteered to be release manager I don't think anyone would disapprove.
I don't understand Mercurial that well. It is not a job I would fancy doing I
must admit. I can understand it is not the easiest of tasks - I do admire anyone
that takes that role on.
- Robert
Dave
--
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
