On 03/02/12 11:46, William Stein wrote: > > On Mar 2, 2012 1:04 AM, "Robert Bradshaw" <rober...@math.washington.edu > <mailto:rober...@math.washington.edu>> wrote: > . >> >> I think the vast majority of spkgs should be vanilla upstream, and for >> those that we do patch, they're likely bugfixes that should make their >> way upstream. But that leaves several packages that we still need to >> patch (either sage-specific changes, or because the >> upstream-patch-release process is too slow). We can't simply not >> support this. > > Moreover, "upstream" includes a huge number of versions of Linux > distributions, versions of OS X, Solaris, etc. It is only by caring > about actual users (who usually don't have root) that one can begin to > comprehend the problem a monolithic distribution of Sage solves. >
That's fine. Somebody else already did this work ten years ago. You stick PATCHES="foo.patch bar.patch" in an ebuild, and they're applied automatically. No more custom patch code in every spkg-install: error handling is done automatically, and best of all, somebody else maintains this. If the patches are upstream fixes, they can go in Gentoo proper if the Gentoo maintainer hasn't already put them there. In the other case, you have sage-specific changes that would break other programs. If you want to totally overwrite python with a version that outputs wingdings to the console, you set PATCHES="wingdings.patch" and make install with DESTDIR="/usr/share/sage/local/whatever". A 'sage' use flag can control that, and the s-o-g/prefix we ship would have that use flag set already. Gentoo's portage is just a framework for building packages from source with dependency resolution. It's designed to solve exactly the problem we have, and it works well for tens of thousands of packages. Moreover, it's maintained by a bunch of people who are good at packaging and system administration. Half (made up statistic) of the work that goes into sage is fixing external packages -- that work would be better spent working on the sage library while the Gentoo devs make sure CFLAGS are respected in 23986523 different packages. -- 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
