On Friday, 24 September 2021 at 11:12:38 UTC-7 wst...@gmail.com wrote: > > In conflict with all of the above, I also personally wish there were a > significantly smaller Sage core with much less > dependencies, and which removes everything from the Sage that annoys Dima, > and much more. This is a difficult > technical challenge, since it would certainly involve changing core parts > of the library. E.g., it would be nice to have > a working Sage that doesn't depend on Maxima or GAP being present, but > still starts up and is generally useful > for the rest of what Sage does. Creating such a thing involves making > significant changes to the assumptions that > can be made in the Sage library code about what they assume is available > by default. > > Be careful what you wish for! Although in this particular case you may not get it anyway, so it wouldn't be a problem. If there are different degrees to which you can have "sage installed" there's a whole new slew of problems that arise: if someone has a problem in such a situation, they need to figure if they have a partial sagemath install and if so, which parts are missing and if their absence causes the problem. I think this would similarly lead to people not recommending to install sagemath. I think an inevitable corollary of having components of sage not mandatory is that support and maintenance of these components deteriorates.
Note that Ken not advising people to install sage doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't advise people to use it. For many people who are not particularly computer-literate, using cloud-based solutions nowadays may be a sensible option. I think for sage there is something called CoCalc that might do a reasonable job. I do think it is important that we do package sage in a way that a lot of people can productively install it, though, and especially that it's easy to get a development-capable installation. On a positive note, a student of mine was able to get a source install on Windows via cygwin running recently. I understand it wasn't pleasant experience, but the student did succeed without outside help -- I was impressed. I would have advised WSL2, which worked quite well for me when I tried it on Win10. He did note that the Cygwin binary distributions available at https://github.com/sagemath/sage-windows/releases only go to 9.3 -- and there were some functional differences between 9.3 and 9.4 that lead to incompatibilities for https://github.com/nbruin/RiemannTheta that should eventually get incorporated in sage to resolve the 12-year old ticket https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/6371. This is partially an experiment to see if offering new functionality initially as a separate pip-installable package improves development and early availability [like a preprint server ...]. One big downside I already found is that "sage -pip install ... --user" doesn't work. People need a LOT of knowledge to use a sagemath python module that is not installed in the main sage tree (which may not be writable for them!). -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/01cf2804-acbe-4c7d-939a-b4fef53d610an%40googlegroups.com.
