I really think that spliting users into "developers" and "non developers" is very much against the spirit of open source Any barrier of entrance to development is against that.
Moreover, I think that the idea of that all the environment has to be controlled when building sage and therefore all the dependencies should be included has some serious drawbacks, like making difficult the creation of packages for different linux distributions (see how difficult would be to update the current debian package to the current sage version) and this goal would be important for attracting more non-technical users to sagre. On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 7:49 AM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > The recent thread: > > "Error building Sage 4.4.3 under vanilla Debian lenny amd64: Error while > installing flint" > > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/54531b50412b9882/2f45257c5e56ab00?lnk=gst&q=Error+building+Sage+4.4.3+under+vanilla+Debian+lenny+amd64%3A+Error+while+installing+flint#2f45257c5e56ab00 > > > is an example of where someone had a broken installation of Debian > (different versions of gcc and g++), so got an error from the 'prereq' > script, which I altered some time ago to detect different versions and exit. > > The poster then went on to try to get CC and/or CXX in order that he got the > same (older) versions of both. > > Such a plan will never work in Sage, as numerous bits of code make direct > calls to "gcc" or "g++" and ignore the environment variables. So any attempt > to do this results on C compiler being used to build one bit of Sage, and > another to build another bit of Sage. That seems a recipe for disaster. > > Hence I'd propose that any attempt to set CC, CXX, FC, or F77 caused the > build to exit with a warning. Then allow an environment variable like > > SAGE_ALLOW_SETTING_OF_COMPILERS > > (better name?) > > that will allow someone to do this, if they really want to. > > Not letting people set CC or similar seems a bit dumb, as it is very useful > for some sort of debugging, or porting to Sun Studio. But it is pretty > dangerous for a typical user to do, as it will never work as they would > expect. > > The same is true really of CP, CHMOD and several other variables. They work > in some parts of Sage, and not in others. > > Dave > > -- > 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 > -- 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
