> > Does anybody actually doctest code in the Sage library that uses > optional packages? I wrote the "#optional" tags so that this would be > possible, but never really kept up with it. > > Yes, though not as often as one might like. There are plenty of tickets where (eventually) bugs have been discovered (and sometimes fixed!) because of this.
> The install process for the optional package can at least run a test > suite, when the SAGE_CHECK variable is set. This could run the > corresponding doctests, which might be in the package. > > This sounds good. But I agree with William that this is important (including the `sage -b` issue). I'm working at a Sage Days prep right now with exactly the kind of people William was talking about in the thread that led to this - people who know quite a bit of math and might want to use some specialized optional package (say, polymake) but would need an awful lot of hand-holding to make it through some of this weird behavior. Unless you want to change the mission statement to say "viable open-source alternative that requires people know about build systems", we should not assume that everyone using Sage is all up on this kind of stuff. I just worked with someone who is doing K-L polynomials, I believe, but definitely has been having a heroic struggle to get Sage to work on a pretty standard Ubuntu laptop (to be fair, partly because of network issues). But this is not the usual "send them to the cloud/sagenb" customer who perhaps can ignore stuff like this. As to `sage -b`, IIRC this comes up with a number of packages; would it be possible to put the warning about `sage -b` at the BEGINNING of the installation script messages? Something like "When this finishes, you may still need to rebuild Sage with sage -b" or the like. Also, how would that work with people with binaries and do not have the toolchain available? Or is gcc and friends required for using sage -i? - kcrisman -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
