I'm all in favor of splitting off the non-mathematical parts into sage-os. I think Gentoo prefix is the most widely-used "hosted distribution" and probably the way to go. Some observations:
Gentoo-prefix uses rpath instead of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH kludge, very good! But this also means that there won't be any binary distributions (even in their current broken state) until we work out the rpath-rewriting. Gentoo-prefix on OSX still needs Xcode. I don't know if one then still has to hunt for the xcode fortran plugin or whether gentoo-prefix can provide a fortran compiler. Gentoo-prefix on windows seems to still require administrative access to install. It is huge (2.6GB) since it contains binaries for all windows versions, so its not really feasible to bundle all platforms. It is only well-tested for Interix (instead of Cygwin) and 32-bit. On all reasonable platforms one shouldn't have to install the whole prefix but use the distribution packages. So I guess the plan is to ask (at installation time) whether to 1) check all requirements are in place (no administrative access required, might fail) 2) install a meta-package that drags in the requirements (requires administrative access) 3) use existing Gentoo-prefix at $EPREFIX 4) install new Gentoo-prefix (prompt for path) Some of these definitely require network access to download packages. So that would deviate from the "everything included" philosophy. Volker -- 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
