On 11/12/2013 12:29 PM, Robert Bradshaw wrote:
>> This is maddening.
>
> Why is this so maddening? Are you out of room on your hard drive? It
> took too long to build? It offends your sense of aesthetics?
Yes, yes, and yes. But there's more:
* Bundling libraries are terrible for security. I should be able to
open a PNG in code that I myself wrote, without worrying about a
buffer overflow. My distro patches these holes immediately. Sage
doesn't, there's just not enough manpower.
* It's wasted thousands of hours of developer time. Look at the
ChangeLog for a major release -- how many of the tickets are math?
How many are a result of trying to bootstrap the universe?
* It doesn't work. At the boundary between stuff-we-build and stuff-
the-system-provides, things break. Sage uses the dvipng built
against my system's gd, but runs it against the one bundled with
sage. *crash* Guess I can't plot anything today.
* Distributions won't touch it. Linux users should be our bread and
butter, but they can't install it. I should be able to tell people
"just type 'yum install sage'", but instead, I have to teach them
how to initiate a big bang the result of which, after millions of
seconds, might look like sage. Then they run into the aforementioned
problems anyway.
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