Operating system-level support would be ideal, I agree, but I would argue that getting all platforms on all participant computers on the same version will never happen. Even at the simplest level: two people bring in their laptops, each with a different Debian release. They will have different software versions, and that difference may or may not be disruptive.
Conda provides a better way, IMHO, to have everyone truly seeing the same thing (window decorations and filesystem paths excluded), and getting the same versions of everything, regardless of what computer and what OS they are using. This gets back to your Docker idea, and that would be even more ideal, if it weren't so hard to use on non-Linux platforms. I haven't tried it in some time, so perhaps things have improved since I last played with it (SciPy2014), but getting into VMs with their own independent filesystems raises the cognitive load quite a bit. On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 12:57 PM Ethan White <[email protected]> wrote: > On 10/31/2015 01:32 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote: > > I have been part of Debian for over twenty years, building (and > designing) > > countless packages (including Octave for a few years and now R for well > over > > a decade) and have seen how a coherent installation and dependency > system can > > work wonders. I would much prefer to see work on (say) nuget for > Windoze, > > brew for OS X and something for apt/yum for those of us on the third > rail. > > We don't need to reinvent packaging. > I'd be +1 for this as well if someone has time to work on it. Basically > I like the idea of moving away from our bootstrapped windows > installation process to something based on a package manager, as long as > the use of that package manager solution is just as simple for novices. > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org >
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