I'll chime in after the recent upgrade and resolving server crashes ;-) In theory, it is very little work/maintenance to install another package - add its name to the list of others and rebuild containers. In practice there may be some packages that don't really work with SageMathCell because they want to communicate with user somehow and the only communication that we support is IPython/Jupyter messages. Displaying graphics for Sage/R/Octave required quite a bit of work. There may be also conflicts between packages and their versions. We ran into an issue with snappy, but as long as the conflict was between optional packages, it was not a big deal - some of these packages just didn't work, as if they were not even there. But during upgrade to SageMath 9.4 it turned out that installing tensorflow replaced Sage's numpy and as a result matplotlib stopped working. Since it is imported at start, servers just won't go up and it took me a while to figure out what is going on. Then the fix was of course easy - just drop installation of tensorflow. The experience, however, was useful in understanding recent crashes that happened a bit after the upgrade. Turned out that users were installing tensorflow as a user package and if something happened afterwards the server could not be restarted.
My point is that we surely can install more and more packages, I'll add koboextractor, but they should not be added "just in case" since the more we have, the more likely we are to run into similar issues in the future. I am also reluctant to whitelist generic servers for internet access - the more we have, the easier it is for a determined user to start using public servers as a compute farm, which could lead to either eliminating network access completely or tightening the limits for computations - neither is desirable. Best regards, Andrey -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-cell" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-cell/df518e43-36f8-47a8-aa05-cd264aef5661n%40googlegroups.com.
