On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 3:36 AM E. Madison Bray <erik.m.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > If I had to run Sage on Windows for some reason today, I would use > > Docker or VirtualBox. I helped support somebody using the Cygwin > > version of Sage on Windows at the Sage booth at the Joint Math > > Meetings last week, and it typically took about 1 minute to start up > > Sage, which was scary. She also was 100% convinced that copy/paste in > > the Sage terminal (really cygwin) didn't work, which would make using > > Sage very painful indeed. It turned out that copy/paste does work if > > you use the context menu. > > I wish you had asked me about this or brought it up with me before > spreading unfounded FUD based on one experience. I really don't > appreciate it--it sets a bad example when the creator of Sage says > "don't use the Windows port of Sage", and is pretty insulting frankly. > What I wrote above was that in my one experience last week helping somebody with Cygwin Sage. These two statements are just an observation I had while helping somebody. > So these are engineering challenges, but solvable ones, not reasons to > say "don't use X". I didn't write "don't use X". I wrote "I would use Docker or VirtualBox", and to clarify I literally meant that "*I* would use..." (I wish I had put I in bold). This is true, and was in response to somebody who wrote to our mailing list who was frustrated with using Cygwin, so it was a fair suggestion. Also, the original poster was contemplating porting Sage to windows, so they are probably extremely technically competent. > The stuff about copy/paste is just nonsense. [...] For me, the best measure for usability is listening to users. Anyways, if you have the chance, I would encourage you to run a booth somewhere and help random people use Sage on Windows all day for a few days. Or to try to create some sort of support community around sage on windows (e.g., a big link right when it starts up to a discourse forum or something). I would guess that right now the canonical support forum for sage on windows might be https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sage-windows, but it has only two posts in the last two years? In any case, for me at least, if I'm not seeing or answering support questions regularly from actual users, it can be hard to know what is really nonsense. I'm sorry again to have deeply insulted you and appreciate the enormous contributions you've made to Sage, and I'll avoid posting about cygwin publicly after that without consulting with you first. -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
