Le vendredi 20 octobre 2017 17:30:54 UTC+2, Nils Bruin a écrit :
>
> Do we actually get real benefit from packaging R with sage?
>
Good question. It has been discussed before. It boils down to a couple of
factors :
- R has been included in Sage for a long time. We do not know which Sage
users do have an intensive use of R. They are not, to say the least, very
vocal on the Sage lists (except for me...). But we do not know what pieces
of (active) software would be broken by excising R from Dage.
- The R removal would be the first removal from Sage of a standard
package. Bad precedent ?
- R has (at least) two interfaces :
- the pexpect interface, which turns out to be surprisingly useful,
but is a bad choice for data interchange ;
- the rpy/rpy2 library interface.
The first one *should* easily use a systemwide R. It probably does not
require the presence of R on a target system to be compiled (but all of
this has to be checked !).
The second one would be difficult to maintain, given asynchronous changes
in R and Sage. The presence of R being no longer guaranteed, it is
difficult to see how it could be compiled without R headers at the very
minimum. So this could only be an optional package.
Furthermore, exploratory work has suggested that completing an rpy2-based
interface was not a trivial task. ITSR that someone (William Stein ?) has
suggested to write a R kernel to be interfaced with Sage the same way
Jupyter does.
In short, the answer might be : "Good idea. Who implements it ?". My
exploratory work showed that none of those tasks are small.
> It seems to me R is a very popular, very mature piece of software.
>
Indeed. R is a flagship for free software, a success story demonstrating
perfectly some of its benefits.
> Isn't it easy to install R on any of the platforms supported by sage?
>
Probably much more easily than Sage ;-]
> If that is the case, wouldn't it be much easier to let sage just work with
> the system-wide R if that is available?
>
See above
> The whole OpenSSL issue would still bite people who have to rely on
> installing R within sage, but if we can just use a system-wide R in most
> cases, that would be a much smaller (empty?) set of people.
>
Other people *are* bitten by the SSL issue : try for example to install a
package with "our" pip... It's juus that I'm not as silent or patient than
these people...
--
Emmanuel Charpentier
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