On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 10:45 PM, Michael Orlitzky <mich...@orlitzky.com> wrote: > On 03/10/2016 03:23 PM, William Stein wrote: >> >> Could you say more? (I mean about what you might imagine Sage could >> do to improve -- both incrementally or dramatically?) I'm sure >> everybody really appreciates your experience, and speaking up about >> this here. >> > After that work has been completed, the spkgs and sage-install could go. > Updating a Sage depencency at that point will involve a one-line change > to configure.ac, and maybe an update to a homebrew package (depending on > how much of that burden we take on). Windows users get a VM, same as > always, unless someone knows how to package things for Cygwin.
I don't think this was intentional, but the degree to which this entire post ignores / dismisses Windows comes off as a bit flippant. Maybe you didn't know this but I'm working on getting sage and its dependencies working on Windows. The VM approach has never been a real viable solution. Eventually, packaging for Cygwin is certainly possible. There's also now Chocolatey which is sort of like a "homebrew for Windows". Finally, and again, the advantage I see with conda is that it works on all 3 OS's (that's nothing to do with the packages themselves working--just the system). That said I agree with everything else you wrote, and the sort of work that would make it possible to build and use conda packages for sage is by and large the same work that would make any other packaging system usable for sage and its dependencies--that is--the work of decoupling the sage distribution from the packaging / build system it uses. > We can still offer big binary packages -- that doesn't have to change -- > but building from source should be as easy as building the Sage python > library. You can get all of the dependencies installed easily by > installing Sage with your package manager. If you want to modify one of > Sage's dependencies, that should be possible -- just make your change in > the upstream project and `make install` it to /usr/local which will then > be picked up when you rebuild the Sage library. I agree. But if I understand correctly William's comment about "change in focus" is that "build everything from source" is not an ideal default for the vast majority of people, including developers. I am new to this project and spent a good amount of time last week trying to better understand what exactly is happening when Sage is sitting there taking hours to build on my laptop, and what exactly I'm building. The example that struck me--that I keep coming back to--is that everything kicked off by building GNU patch. And I kept thinking to myself--why the heck are you building patch for me? I already have a perfectly good patch program--the exact same version in fact. Looking at the SPKG.txt I can understand why--patch isn't the same on all systems. But really (especially these days) that should be a minority case, and Sage should have just used the `patch` I have. It's a minor example that only takes a tiny bit of time to compile, but from there I came to understand the large number of other such dependencies. *Even if* Sage absolutely required me to have a special version of patch to build packages from source (and indeed, even assuming I want to build from source at all), it would have been much quicker to download, unpack, and install a binary package that has already been built for me. Yes, for linear algebra libraries and like I may want to recompile them and their dependencies for my platform. But that doesn't mean I gain anything from building *everything* (or even most things) from source. That's why I didn't use gentoo for very long last time I tried it--I don't have time for that. Neither do most users. So anyways, I agree building from source is good to have. But it doesn't need to be the default. -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
