On Thursday, 27 April 2023 at 03:59:22 UTC-7 Michael Orlitzky wrote: It's not the end of the world if users on a distro with old dependencies have to stick to an older version of sage. Ideally, they would be getting sage from their distro in the first place. A problem only arises when you try to build a bleeding-edge sage on an older stable distro -- an undertaking unsupported by most projects. Anyone bothered by this can of course send us patches that extend compatibility to older PARI. The burden of universal support would however be transferred from the sage developers to the distros where it rightfully lies.
It may be that the situation about packaging math software has genuinely improved; in which case this likely thanks to sage: it took a whole bunch of math software, made it so that it could build in a coherently working whole, raised the profile to such a level that people with good connections to distributions stood up willing to support it as package distributions. But another problem before was that the different packages would not develop in lockstep. Some components might need one specific version of prerequisites and others another. So one could run into genuine version conflicts. Sagemath was in a position to then resolve to conflict in the best way *for sage*. It's not clear to me that distributions, that have to serve other interests as well, will be able to do the same. It's also not entirely clear to me that distribution maintainers will always be able to catch erroneous behaviour due to mismatched components. So that's where sage-the-distribution still serves as an insurance policy -- something to fall back on when the version requirements make it impossible to run a set of packages together on a system-wide distribution. it may be an option to provide a reference VM/docker image rather than a "sage-the-distribution" if that is easier to maintain, but at the moment, since we're not providing that, it would be more work. -- 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/1a5e37ce-b740-49a1-a7cb-43995c779c18n%40googlegroups.com.
