On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 3:49 AM, Peter Jeremy <peterjer...@acm.org> wrote: > On 2010-Mar-29 16:08:48 -0700, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >>Let's make some system-wide Python a prerequisite. Full stop. > > It's not quite 1st April even here.
This is not an April fools joke. > > I could understand Python being a prerequisite if Sage was going to > use it at runtime but requiring it to be present solely to build > another copy of Python strikes me as wasteful. If Sage is aiming at > being self-contained, it needs to reduce its reliance on > prerequisites, not increase it. What is wrong with using shell > scripts to build Python? In some cases it sucks. I could go on and on, but won't, since this issue has already been addressed above. > If a user wants to download Sage as binary package, will they still > need Python as a prerequisite? No, of course not -- Python comes with the Sage binary !? > >> I >>think all of our officially supported platforms come with Python by >>default, anyways. > > There are Python packages available for most current operating > systems. There are probably far fewer operating system distributions > that have Python installed by default. I suspect this decision will > only increase the effort required to port Sage to other platforms. Is there even *one* operating system that building Sage from source officially supports that doesn't include Python by default or with their build-essentials package (which is needed to build sage)? I've asked this multiple times in this thread now, and nobody has replied. Here is the list of supported platforms, from the README.txt: PROCESSOR OPERATING SYSTEM x86 32-bit Linux -- Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS (=Red Hat), Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva x86_64 64-bit Linux -- Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS (=Red Hat), Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva IA-64 Itanium 2 64-bit Linux -- Red Hat, SUSE x86 Apple Mac OS X 10.5.x PPC Apple Mac OS X 10.5.x Use Sage on Microsoft Windows via VirtualBox. We do not always test on OS X 10.4, but Sage should work there fine. --- In each case above, the Linux distro is meant to be the latest stable released version. -- William -- 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 To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.