On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 12:51 PM, Francesco Biscani <bluesca...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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)?
See http://wiki.sagemath.org/faq/bigsagerant for another past Sage release manager's rant on this topic from long ago (maybe 2008?). "== Wouldn't it be way better if Sage did not ship as a gigantic bundle? == This has been discussed over and over again and it plainly doesn't work. The Sage in Debian does not pass doctests, not even close. In general the combinatorial explosion of configurations to debug is way too large and it is next to impossible to find any distribution where the version numbers even remotely match. We updated to GAP 4.4.12 in Sage 3.3 and the doctests involving GAP will in certain files be broken with any previous GAP release. If you used the Debian packages for Singular Sage won't work since we patch NTL and when those NTL libs come in conflict either Sage doesn't compile or Singular blows up. I can go on and on and on about similar issues and that is only the stuff I know about right on top of my head. I have never taken the time to go out and do dumb things to break Sage :) In the near future we plan to upgrade to a svn release of the development version of pari and then closely track it as bugs we report are often only fixed in pari-2.4.3svn. There is *no* way any distribution can track this without potentially breaking other code dependent on pari and you will be royally screwed if you want to use pari 2.3.4 in Sage (the stable release at this point) since Sage won't even build. We will fix all in tree code that gets broken with the new pari-svn and push it back upstream, but until that shows up in a distribution we will long have shipped Sage 4.0. The way we do it is the only way and I have doubts that any distribution packaged Sage will even be able to keep up with the official release given that I (=Michael Abshoff) spend working full time as the Sage release manager :)" > > 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. Those are a different domain of software engineering. Mathematics software is fundamentally different than word processing, graphical desktop, and web browser software. It doesn't matter much if a line in a UI is off by one pixel. In mathematics, being off by 1 can result in major bugs all over Sage. The Sage distribution model, which has frequently been attacked every single year for nearly a decade, is one of the most important reasons for Sage's success. That said, if somebody had the energy to make and maintain a branch/fork of Sage that could easily integrate with Linux distros, more power to them. I'd be happy to host it, point to it on the sage website, etc. If I had infinite resources (money) I would definitely hire somebody to create and maintain such a thing. It wouldn't even be a question. The problem is that right now we have *extremely* limited resources and have to make choices. -- William -- 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.
