Kasper Peeters wrote:
I'd propose that we include in any binary distribution gcc's C, C++ and Fortran
shared libraries.
I personally think that this is a _very_ bad idea. As others have
emphasised, most
systems out there have a proper package management tool, which can
moreover
take care of dependencies. By doing all that yourself, you also burden
yourself with
the task of keeping the Sage-packaged external programs and libraries
up to date.
I'm not saying there are not ways of doing this. But a small, though not
insignificant number of people seem to be getting bitten by a failure to have
the required libraries. In fact, after a fortran compiler was removed from Sage
on Linux (there is still one for OS X), there were instances of those without
the Fortran library, so the addition of the Fortran library was made a 'blocker'
by William.
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/8049
So the Fortran library is shipped.
I just looked at an install of Mathematica on Solaris and notice they ship
'libzip.so' and 'libsqlite.so' as well as the java runtime environment
libmawt.so. In fact, there are tons of libraries which could be found on some
systems, but Wolfram Research obvious feel the desire to include them.
While on this topic, can anyone point me to a good read on why Sage
includes every
known piece of software under the sun in its distribution? I would
personally prefer to
get rid of that _all_ and instead use the energy to support deb/rpm/
pkg/... maintainers.
Cheers,
Kasper
The reason is most of the packages in Sage have small modifications. To suggest
to users that they download X, but modifications A, B and C, then download Y,
but make modifications D, E and F would put off too many people. Have a look in
$SAGE_ROOT/spkg/standard, then look for the packages that end in .p0.spkg,
.p1.spkg, .p2.spkg. All of them have had some changes. Often that are
modifications of the source code. ATLAS has modifications to take care of a bug
in a memset() in some older Solaris releases. libz has changes to allow a 64-bit
build on OS X. Those are two I can think of, but there are tons of them.
To be honest, as Sage consists of about 100 items, it would be hard to know
where to start with some bug reports when you don't know precisely what versions
of the libraries people have, and whether those libraries have been updated to a
version Sage is not tested with.
Also, some of the libraries might change to GPL 3. If those libraries did not
form part of the core operating system, Sage should not link to them.
As much as I can see why people do not like this, I can see a lot of logic in
William's approach.
Dave
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