On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 1:37 AM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > 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.
This GPL3 comment is not really an issue. > As much as I can see why people do not like this, I can see a lot of logic > in William's approach. I'm going to add a few comments supporting this. The goal of Sage is to compete with the likes of all of Magma, Mathematica and Matlab, and as such it is a necessarily a complicated piece of software, being more complicated than any one of those Ma's. Most people don't appreciate how complicated Sage is. At this point, I don't think I even do. It would be better for end users if we built standard rpm/deb/etc. packages that integrate well with the rest of each Linux, OS X, Solaris, Windows, etc., operating system, and of course regularly tested that the full test suite passes on each system, and when packages on those systems get old or too new, deal with those problems. That would be wonderful. Unfortunately, we have to be realistic, given the resources that we have available. How many major software projects with a similar level of complexity to Sage actually do this? I can think of exactly one: Open Office. That project is at least as complicated as Sage (maybe more). Who creates all of their packages? Do the Open Office developers? Or the projects such as MacPorts, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, RedHat, etc.? Are there any Open Office devs reading this? Doesn't the OpenOffice project have dozens of fulltime developers, employed by IBM and Sun? Sage still has 0 fulltime devs. -- William -- 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
