Bill Hart wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to open the flint spkg from the recent sage. As per the
> instructions I typed:
> 
> tar jxvf flint-1.3.0.p1.spkg
> 
> on sage.math, but it complained:
> 
> bzip2: (stdin) is not a bzip2 file.
> tar: Child returned status 2
> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

That looks right to me, I'm not sure why it does not work for you.

> I still don't understand why the libraries have to be in this spkg
> format. Surely it makes more sense for an open source project to have
> *all* code accessible easily, i.e. in source form, not packed into
> tar.?? files.
> 
> Does anyone else feel the same way about this issue? Is there a
> technical reason for using a non-standard spkg format instead of
> having the source trees accessible from within the sage source tree?
> 
> Bill.


I agree with you 100% Bill.

I can see the .spkg format saves on the disk space requirements, as only 
a small fraction of the code is decompressed at any one time.

But it has lots of problems I feel. Take my recent post:

What  keeps calling 'top' and 'grep' ?

I can see from the processes being created that something is calling 
'top -b -n' thousands of times. Had Sage been distributed as a big 
tar.bz2  file, I could extract that, and then use a recursive grep to 
find 'top -b -n'.

But it is much more difficult to do things like this in the spkg format. 
I've also noticed some times, that despite running

$ ./sage -sh

I am unable to make changes to some packages in a sensible way, so I end 
up creating a new .spkg just to test some changes.

I'd personally much rather see the Sage code was distributed as a more 
conventional .tar.gz or .tar.bz2.


Dave



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