On Thursday, May 5, 2011 3:42:59 AM UTC+2, Ondrej Certik wrote: > > On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 12:51 AM, dagss <d.s.se...@astro.uio.no> wrote: > > I don't really have a say in this, but I've given this a lot of thought > > since I decided to drop Sage as my scientific Python distribution a year > ago > > and have been searching for a new one ever since. > > Just curious --- why did you drop it? Is it described at ideas.rst below? >
Well, I figured that making SPKG's wasted too much of my time, and that I didn't any of the benefits I'd expect (like clean upgrading etc.). I guess I just discovered Sage's premise: The point is to simplify things for end-users, not the developers (and the distinction between the two is too high). As I don't care too much about distributing my software to others (I don't have any peer cosmologists using Python), the conclusion was I should stop writing SPKG's and rather just easy_install what I missed. Then I realized that EPD had a lot of packages that I missed (and had to manually install) in Sage, so I switched to patching my EPD install instead of my Sage install. I'm not happy about the situation, but the benefits of current systems are too small to warrant the investment. Hence scidist/ideas.rst, which is what I'd like to have in a system to make it more than worth the investment of starting to use it + lowering the investment necessary. > > My problem with Gentoo in general is that it solves the problems that > SPKGs > > have by adding complexity (in the same way any Linux distro does). > > I much prefer something like Nix (http://nixos.org), where Eelco Dolstra > > instead had a new, brilliant idea which just makes simple things > powerful. I > > wrote these notes up on using Nix for a scientific Python distribution > > (including Sage): > > https://github.com/dagss/scidist/blob/master/ideas.rst > > > > (I may be interested in putting in work in this direction...) > > But of course, Gentoo has a scientific community etc. etc. which Nix sort > of > > lacks, so I can definitely see Gentoo making more sense for you. > > > Btw, I have created a Sage compatible distribution: > > http://qsnake.com/ > > all source code is hosted at github, and this 800 lines script: > > https://github.com/qsnake/qsnake/blob/master/spkg/base/qsnake_run.py > > is the whole "qsnake" program (just like the "sage" program) with all > options, package management (with build dependencies etc.) and so on. > Well, for me EPD would work better as my stopgap solution because of existing package set. Long-term I think the Nix idea of cached build derivations is too good to give up (which doesn't exclude being Sage-compatible). Dag sverre > -- 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
