On Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:41:58 Michael Orlitzky wrote: > On 03/02/12 12:47, William Stein wrote: > > By "Gentoo" do you mean "Gentoo prefix" [1] everywhere in this message? > > Not really. The "Prefix" project is just a way to run portage (the > package manager) out of a non-root directory. So, for example, you could > install the Prefix copy of portage in $HOME/usr/portage, and have all of > your packages installed under $HOME/usr/bin, $HOME/usr/share, etc. as > opposed to /usr/portage, /usr/bin, and /usr/share. > > It's not much of a simplification to say that "Gentoo" is just "Gentoo > Prefix" running out of /. Any fix committed to portage is automatically > a part of both Gentoo installations and Prefix -- they're the same > repository. > > What separates them is keywording. Every package has "keywords" that > specify for which architectures the package exists or is stable. The > prefix project has its own keywords, and nothing gets marked "unstable" > or "stable" until someone has actually tested it in a prefix installation. > > Naturally, there are fewer people using Prefix than normal Gentoo > installs. Therefore, fewer packages get tested and marked stable. > > > 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? > These marks most-likely refer to the number of packages (as a portion of > the total in portage) that work on Prefix for that architecture. So in a > way, it doesn't matter for us: if Sage and all of its dependencies > build, we have everything we need. > > On the other hand, the fact that there are fewer packages for one > architecture means that there are probably fewer developers and users > for that arch, so it might be harder to get a package stabilized in > preparation for a Sage release. > > In practice, it's usually pretty easy to get things keyworded for > Prefix. Since the package already works on normal Gentoo installs, most > of the "real" problems are already known. You just have to make sure it > doesn't hard-code paths before it can be enabled in Prefix. > > If a few sage developers become Gentoo developers, this problem goes > away entirely. >
Of course some gentoo dev could become sage dev [that would be me] in order to help it work better in gentoo. you may be oversimplifying the support level of prefix. But we have tried to make sure that sage works in a prefix on linux (x86/x86_64) and OS X (I run that, although I haven't tried on 10.7 Georg S. Weber may have). Steve Trogdon run prefix on a number of linux distro for example. We haven't tried the more exotic target for lack of hardware and access. > > Do you think Gentoo prefix really and completely solves the problems > > you have with Sage being distributed monolithically? > > It does solve all of the problems I've thought of, but I probably > haven't thought of them all. If it would be useful to create a list, I'm > willing to explain how Gentoo/Prefix solves (or doesn't) those problems. > That's good. I'll leave explanations to you. Bear in mind that there are a few things that William may want that are not addressed by sage-on-gentoo (but may be in the future). Ease of development by cloning the sage tree would be one of them. Francois -- 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
