On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Aleksej Saushev <a...@inbox.ru> wrote: > 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.
That's false. Even if it were true, BSD is largely irrelevant to the point Robert is making, as it has such a small install base (certainly less than 0.1% of mathematicians use it). -- 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
