No offense, but everyone who has written so far in this thread is speaking only to people who know what the word "toolchain" means in this context. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't provide a fortran compiler, and setting one up for those who don't know that word is nontrivial and goes against the (in my opinion, more important) Sage philosophy of "batteries included". It's particularly annoying that on older Macs gfortran isn't even available so we need g95, but that is also how it is, and we definitely still get people asking about this platform as well.
Basically, someone who would like to have a brand spankin' new Sage they can call their own (as opposed to a binary download) should not have needless hurdles placed in front of them. Should we provide gcc? No - downloading Xcode or installing it is a little annoying, but fairly straightforward even for newbies, because Apple wants to make it easy for them. But fortran is another matter. Pablo, are you suggesting that sage -sdist would make two different types of source distributions, one for Mac, one for non-Mac? That could be confusing, but I guess as long as they were (automatically, in the sdist process) named VERY clearly, and it was VERY obvious on the download site which was which (and why there is a difference), that could be a solution (though it would add some responsibilities to someone, either web person or release manager). But certainly 33 MB is nothing to sniff at, particularly in situations with low bandwidth. What does that (piece of Sage) compress to in the .tgz? - kcrisman -- 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
