I ignored this thread because of the title, but I guess I shouldn't have!
> 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 >> >> Yes. If we want all doctests to pass, this is the issue. (Sometimes also for building or for supporting new code, but let's just focus on that.) So the real issue is that it is very challenging to put together *exact* versions where every last doctest passes on all platforms we regularly use. Distros presumably have another focus. > In all honesty, I think you should throw golden bridges to people like > Julien and Francois who are doing all this heavy-lifting work on the > software engineering side of things. I think that having sage integrating > with distro packages would not only be a benefit from the point of view of > expanding the userbase, I think it would also greatly increase the software > engineering quality of sage and related packages. > This is also a good idea. François has been incredibly helpful with a lot of stuff I was completely lost by in getting this or that to work. We should be honoring that work as a community, because it is not very visible and doesn't lead directly to lots of papers, but makes a lot of those visible results possible by providing necessary infrastructure to doing science! The elephant no one is mentioning, of course, is that the number of potential users of (non-cloud-based) Sage is limited FAR FAR FAR more by the fact we do not have a native Windows port. (Despite awesome work by JP and others with Cygwin!) Sorry to say it, esp. since Linux and Mac are more relevant in science academia. And for Mac we definitely do need to provide a full distro, unless someone is seriously suggesting that we should ask all Sage users on Mac to use homebrew. (And while I rant on that, I have to say that anyone who uses Linux in a scientific environment almost certainly knows how to download source and type "make". So I'm really not sure why this is such a problem, compared to the users I am usually dealing with. But I don't use Linux in a scientific environment, so that could be ignorance.) Here is an idea. I know nothing about packaging so it might be dumb. But see what you think. Problem 1: We don't want to hold up Sage development because of a slow upstream, or an upstream that doesn't package much for Debian (say). Problem 2: A lot of people really want to "yum sagemath" or something like that, and it's very hard to do this. Possible Solution: Have a (very) occasional Sage release that relies only on pure upstreams that are packaged in such a distro. Much slower release cycle than regular Sage. Maybe we just say "Sage-2015" and it is just whatever has to be done to the Sage released by Jan. 1 2015 to make things work. Then a year later one does it again. Downside: Someone still has to figure out what that magic blend of secret herbs and spices is that will make this possible. Downside: People doing "yum sagemath" will get an older Sage than normal. Upside: It will be possible to do, and not require maintainers to constantly be trying to make things line up, just on a slow basis. Upside: It will bypass people complaining about download size (which is substantial in developing contexts, not quite so much in Western academia) and similar issues. Probably this is untenable for some obvious reason, but anyway it's putting something concrete out there. Have fun! - 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 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.
