Hi, this is circle of questions coming up every now and then, I try to give a complete yet not too long answer.
The Sage community is limited in resources, and for the time being, the focus is set e.g. to further broaden the number of systems that are supported. Solaris and BSD are on a good way, but not completely done yet AFAIK, considerable efforts are spent on Cygwin, and native support for Windows (both in 32bit and 64bit mode) is envisaged. Given this and other arguments, a clear and precise design decision has been made --- there is one and only one Sage distribution which includes "almost everything", but which (builds and) runs on a large variety of systems at one and the same time, with as few system- dependent deviations as possible (for easy maintainability). This design decision allows for some comfort, e.g. you can move around the whole Sage tree, and upon startup, some internal hardcoded paths have to be adjusted once, but then it runs fine. Or else, you could install Sage-2.9 (say) and Sage-4.2 at the same time (in different directories of course), although these two version of Sage might depend on different (even incompatible) libraries/progams resp. versions of libraries/programs (to be found under the respective SAGE_ROOT/local/lib/ and SAGE_ROOT/local/bin/ directories). Another benefit is the possibility to distribute precompiled binary distributions of Sage (that can be more or less just copied to some directory of the users choice). That said, there should be no need to "rip out some libraries", and there should not be collisions. Everything is supposed to live happily side-by-side. If problems happen (and they do), usually some environment settings are messed up --- or it is a bug in Sage. Of course there dreams of providing version of Sage that are simply "apt-gettable" into current Debian/Ubuntu installs, to have Sage- x.y.z.rpm's for Fedora, and so on (I remember some recent work for Mandriva in that direction). But currently, simply the manpower lacks to do the necessary building and testing (resp. the possibly available forces are occupied with tasks that at the moment are considered to be more important). Help is always welcome, and be it in the form of a precise bug report --- what kind of problem do you have with gnutls? Cheers, Georg P.S.: William et.al., please feel free to correct me ... -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
