On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 9:32 AM, Michael Orlitzky <mich...@orlitzky.com> wrote: > On 03/02/12 11:46, William Stein wrote: >> >> On Mar 2, 2012 1:04 AM, "Robert Bradshaw" <rober...@math.washington.edu >> <mailto:rober...@math.washington.edu>> wrote: >> . >>> >>> I think the vast majority of spkgs should be vanilla upstream, and for >>> those that we do patch, they're likely bugfixes that should make their >>> way upstream. But that leaves several packages that we still need to >>> patch (either sage-specific changes, or because the >>> upstream-patch-release process is too slow). We can't simply not >>> support this. >> >> Moreover, "upstream" includes a huge number of versions of Linux >> distributions, versions of OS X, Solaris, etc. It is only by caring >> about actual users (who usually don't have root) that one can begin to >> comprehend the problem a monolithic distribution of Sage solves. >> > > That's fine. Somebody else already did this work ten years ago. You > stick PATCHES="foo.patch bar.patch" in an ebuild, and they're applied > automatically. No more custom patch code in every spkg-install: error > handling is done automatically, and best of all, somebody else maintains > this. If the patches are upstream fixes, they can go in Gentoo proper if > the Gentoo maintainer hasn't already put them there.
By "Gentoo" do you mean "Gentoo prefix" [1] everywhere in this message? Does it concern you that the support matrix at [1] gives a seemingly low mark "ok" (instead of good/excellent) for many important Sage platforms? Do you think Gentoo prefix really and completely solves the problems you have with Sage being distributed monolithically? [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/ > In the other case, you have sage-specific changes that would break other > programs. If you want to totally overwrite python with a version that > outputs wingdings to the console, you set PATCHES="wingdings.patch" and > make install with DESTDIR="/usr/share/sage/local/whatever". A 'sage' use > flag can control that, and the s-o-g/prefix we ship would have that use > flag set already. > > Gentoo's portage is just a framework for building packages from source > with dependency resolution. It's designed to solve exactly the problem > we have, and it works well for tens of thousands of packages. Moreover, > it's maintained by a bunch of people who are good at packaging and > system administration. Half (made up statistic) of the work that goes > into sage is fixing external packages -- that work would be better spent > working on the sage library while the Gentoo devs make sure CFLAGS are > respected in 23986523 different packages. > > -- > 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 -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- 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
