On 19 February 2015 at 18:05, Julien Puydt <julien.pu...@laposte.net> wrote: > > All distributions have thousands of packages, and deps are not a big > issue. Sage-the-distribution has about a hundred, and it's a big issue. >
This is something I have failed to understand so far. What is it that makes Sage require such special handling of dependencies (i.e., package everything in one monolithic blob and with ad-hoc patching)? There's a lot of complex software around with long dependency chains (Firefox, Chrome, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice, ...) and it seems like most Linux distributions are able to deal with this, without too many issues, via system-wide libraries. Even in the presence of libraries that do not do stable releases (e.g., ffmpeg a few years ago is a notable example I think) or do not guarantee a stable API. Of course, problems and incompatibilities arise occasionally, but many distributions have developed mechanisms to cope with this (e.g., SLOTs in Gentoo, proper versioning, reverse dependency checking, blockers, etc.). I understand that the big blob probably makes it easier on platforms such as OSX, but honestly, all this stuff about packaging, versioning, etc. has been a solved problem on Linux distributions for quite a while now. -- 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 sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
