Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> writes: > On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 6:21 AM, Dr. David Kirkby > <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: >> >> and those changes get put into Sage, without any discussion >> of what's actually needed in Sage, and what should be written as an external >> program. > > I think part of this is due to the historical context in which Sage > arose. Pre-Sage, the open source mathematical landscape consisted of a > few large pieces (e.g. Pari, Gap, Maxima) and dozens of specialized > libraries (gfan, ntl, ...) most of which were hard to build, needed > manually managed dependencies, and didn't interoperate with each > other. The Sage community is often accused of being full of more > mathematicians than programmers, and though to some people manually > configuring, compiling, and installing various interdependent > libraries is all in a days work this is not what mathematicians enjoy > spending their time doing (if they even have the background at all).
FreeBSD ports collection and NetBSD portable pkgsrc exist for a decade at least. They make all packages build with "make all", install with "make install", and track dependencies. > Along comes Sage with it's kitchen sink strategy (and a huge amount of > hard work to get all these systems to build out of the box) and it's > hailed as "the easiest way to get X" for many X which were before only > available separately. Since then it's grown as we now have many of > these these programs working together, hundreds of thousands of lines > of new code, and a (subjectively) nice Python and notebook interface. Along comes monolythic Sage that can't build on neither major BSD platform, even though all principal components are there and Sage is written in Python itself. -- HE CE3OH... -- 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
