On 4/25/07, mabshoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > For a while we didn't support cygwin and only distributed SAGE using > > colinux and/or vmware. But colinux isn't really that good for various > > reasons (though performance wasn't bad), and vmware can be painful > > as well -- the download for sage in vmware is huge (500MB), and > > setting up appropriate networking between vmware and windows > > to run the notebook very often doesn't just work. Overall Cygwin seems > > to be the best tradeoff. If I had way way more resources I would > > investigate other options. > > > > I think that it might be worth investigating to compile sage and its > libraries with MSVC and run all the external executables with cygwin > for the time being. pyrex seems to support msvc 2003 and up, so there > is a chance I guess.
Is it even possible to create a pseudo-tty interface to a cygwin program from the MSVC compiled version of Python? The pexpect website says: "Pexpect does not currently work on the standard Windows Python (see the pty requirement); however, it seems to work fine using Cygwin. It is possible to build something like a pty for Windows, but it would have to use a different technique that I am still investigating. I know it's possible because Libes' Expect was ported to Windows. If you have any ideas or skills to contribute in this area then I would really appreciate some tips on how to approach this problem." > > Providing excellent support for Windows is of course a high priority > > because MS Windows is by far the most popular operating system. > > But it's challenging because SAGE is a collection of dozens > > open source math software programs, and > > most of those programs are Windows unfriendly (their developers > > mostly use Linux). Fortunately Python, which is the core of SAGE, is > > pretty Windows friendly. > > > > Yep. The main issue I see on the horizon is cygwin's 32 bit limit. A > lot of systems today (even laptops) get sold with 2G+ Ram and the way > it looks cygwin will not support 64 bit binaries anytime soon now. > Obviouly that doesn't hurt the casual user, but I routinely compute > GBases that need 8GB+ (not on Windows, though). I always thought that > most serious computer algebra people would use Linux/Unix or nowadays > even MacOSX, but there is a frightening number of people out there who > only like and use Windows or are forced to use it. Virtualisation will > help in the future, but as you stated the technical issues of > networking are somewhat of an issue, while the performance penalty > will be lessened by better hardware virtualisation in the future. Such a user would likely get actually better overall performance with VMware (which supports 64-bit computing) and Linux running in it than with any sort of native windows solution. The other option for windows is to push much harder the idea of a VMware "virtual machine" for SAGE, which fortunately isn't so bad of an idea since at least vmware player is free. And I think windows users can't complain about running SAGE via a closed source virtualizer, given that they are running everything via a closed-source operating system. My impression though is that for certain types of work cygwin is best and for others vmware is, so one should support both. William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
