On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 6:19 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 5:56 PM, Eviatar <eviatarb...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Just out of curiosity: why are you forking a separate project instead >> of developing Sage? > > I think the main issue is that Sage contains a lot of dependencies and > code that are not needed for people doing Finite Element Method (say) > work. But nonetheless, there are useful ideas in how Sage is > constructed, which Ondrej's project also benefits from.
Also so that we can quickly release a new version, update a package and so on. Also, what I did in Qsnake is that I wrote a completely new build system (in pure Python, as one simple file) and also I have added a lot of new packages, not in standard Sage. By doing it separately, I can simply create a version, that "just works". Plus I wanted to use git and github etc., as these tools make me a lot more productive (subjective reason). In any case, I have strictly stayed with the SPKG packages, so that any improvements (let's say after my new packages mature) can be incorporated in standard Sage, eventually. So I view it as simply organizing the work, rather than a competing fork. > > As a related example, shortly after I started Sage (in 2005), Ondrej > started Sympy (in 2006), which does symbolic calculus. At least for > a while, much of what Sympy did, one could do more quickly in Sage. > That said, I just went to the app store recently and downloaded a > program called PythonMath, which I find handy on occasion: it turns > out PythonMath is basically Python + Sympy, which is _vastly_ easier > to port to the iPhone than Sage. Yes. For the kind of math that I do, in daily research (electronic structure calculations and other quantum mechanics stuff), sympy always worked great, and having no other depenencies than Python, it was exactly what I always needed. For the kind of math that William does, Sage has always worked much better. Also, sympy is just a symbolic library (and that's it, so one has to use other libraries for plotting, numerics, notebook...), while Sage is everything. And thus the motivation for Qsnake --- to have a program, that contains everything and "just works". I would put Qsnake on the same level as psage: http://purple.sagemath.org/, if I understand the motivation of psage correctly, it's aim is also to eventually integrate the useful packages (once they mature from "research" to "production") into Sage. Looking here: http://purple.sagemath.org/goals.html That's pretty much the same motivation for Qsnake. Except that I need a different set of packages (and I need Fortran). Ideally, there would be a huge repository of SPKG packages (just like the huge repository that Ubuntu has, with almost everything), and one could quickly install just what one needs. So I am trying to figure this out too with Qsnake. But it's easier said than done. Ondrej -- 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
