I understand that some macOS users are very comfortable with Sage the distro playing the role of a missing macOS package manager,
The real question is about *users* in this case, not developers. I just got messed up the other day brew updating something which killed my Python 3.9 I need in order to use a specific package (nothing to do with Sage, completely orthogonal) for a certain course, a package which doesn't support the most recent Pythons yet, and frankly my teaching load (unlike perhaps that of most Sage developers, I acknowledge) doesn't leave time to learn the intricacies of pyenv or whatever there is out there to rectify such situations (I don't *mind* having 3.12 on my box ...). Sage's "batteries included" means all my Sage installations of various vintages stay sandboxed, essentially, and that is pretty comforting. My guess is that most Sage *users* are in this kind of situation. The WSL solution using some version of conda now might allow something similar (?) for the VAST number of Windows users out there. CoCalc probably provides a single solution to a large number of users too (how large, I don't know) for people using Mac and Windows in their day-to-day work, who don't mind a little Terminal to get some math done but don't want to use Linux (among other reasons, because many of us can't afford our own personal computers for work, so we have to take the options work gives us, which is emphatically not Linux). It's great that the fairly small number of Linux users wordwide have the package manager concept, but its very fragmentation (!!!) surely takes a lot of developer time too (not just for Sage) as well. So this argument, by itself, isn't sufficient. but it makes me sad that I spent many months of my time debugging and improving Sage on macOS, and getting this kind of cold shoulder in response to my requests. This is totally legitimate, as I've said before, and is the real crux of the issue. I would hope people who don't want "batteries included" could live with it if there weren't a lot of unseen maintenance. Under past circumstances, there would have been a Sage Days of some kind by now (in person) to hash out how to resolve the situation *with an acceptable consensus*, even if still imperfect, which lightens the load significantly on Linux package managers while keeping the other progress made on track. We need something approximating this sort of summit now to resolve these issues - and I certainly do think there is an acceptable solution out there. -- 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/c22329d3-cf4e-4790-80ed-869b32ad61c7n%40googlegroups.com.
