There is a fundamental difference between math and system libraries. Specialist software receives much less testing, especially on exotic architectures. You can easily be the first one who builds X on Y and run into some obscure bug. So it is valuable to collect mathematical programs and make sure that they build on a variety of systems and collect the patches to do so.
System libraries, on the other hand, receive much more attention. Just building a whole distribution with a given libstdc++, say, is a great testcase. Since you mention zlib, Fedora applies 2 patches to that library. Does the zlib spkg also include those? Compiler and more general system libraries are even worse. A lot of work goes into core libraries, and it would be a total waste to duplicate that effort. The default should be to not duplicate system libraries. Only in those (few) cases where the OS does not have a usable packaging system / ships a broken library / etc, the sage binary distribution (for that OS) should include the library as a workaround. -- 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
