On Sunday, 8 February 2026 at 11:17:21 UTC-8 [email protected] wrote: [...] I would recommend a full rebuild of sagemath after updating any dependencies.
I think we need some different ways to install sage then and document them. Obviously, an ideal answer would be "just install the standard package for sage from your distribution" but then we need that sage is packaged for all/most distributions and that those packages are kept reasonably up-to-date. Neither is true at the moment. Even if that is going to be true in the future we still need an interim solution to bridge the time in between. The kind of instructions I'm thinking about would be ones that are acceptable for a mildly competent sysadmin who is maintaining, say, a slew of VMs that people access for their general computing needs. They may well configure those to regularly run auto-updates on. I'm not so sure they'd be willing to install custom post-update scripts. It's probably somewhat acceptable for developers (like you and to some extent me) to recompile sage after an update (note that you'll generally not know for sure that a *dependency* for sage has been updated because that's hidden in a list of 500 packages that are getting updated), but it's far outside the normal experience for outside software like magma, maple, matlab, google-chrome, etc: one installs them on a linux system and system updates don't end up touching the install (usually in "/opt" somewhere) and it keeps running fine. Does a non-editable install from source fare better for this? (sure, an ABI-breaking upgrade would be a problem, but perhaps those don't happen so much?) Perhaps that needs to be documented a little more prominently then? Conda seems to do a reasonable job (and even seems to provide binaries!). Can we have a guide written up for a sysadmin to install sage using conda in such a way that the users don't need to mess with conda themselves? I think that just involves a shim script that sets up the conda environment without relying on the user shell to do that. Perhaps some AppImage/flatpak/... builds? Those tend to have their own kinds of breakage but perhaps that can be avoided. I understand the push to disentangle sage-the-library and sage-the-distribution, but sage-the-library still needs to be distributed and I suspect we'll need to do that ourselves at least until enough distributions agree to do it for us. -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/94dc9cd8-d339-4cf7-bd56-d84dbd6aad23n%40googlegroups.com.
