One thing that hasn't been mentioned is possibly separating build infrastructure (gcc, patch, iconv, ...) from the specialist mathematical libraries. The former are generally available in usable form from your distro, or can be compiled without too much hassle in some overlay (say, gentoo prefix / plain lmonade) since it is following a relatively beaten path. And has been written/checked by people with some experience in software engineering. And if, say, there is a bug in the perl ebuild then its probably already been fixed in the gentoo community so we don't have to do it ourselves.
The specialist mathematical libraries, by contrast, don't get much exposure. And even if somebody packaged them then generally in useless form. E.g. Fedora ships symmetrica, but its useless since it is not compiled with -DFAST. Which nobody knows what it does except that, otherwise, you'll get segfaults. So for all practical purposes we have to build private versions of some libraries. And since they haven't been written by software engineers the individual build systems are generally a mess, so you can mostly forget about configure/make/make install. So essentially we'll have to use the current system of shell scripts to build the beast, there often isn't much logic that can be shared between them. In terms of the FHS this would all be installed in a subdirectory /usr/lib/sage/ and could technically be a called a fork of the upstream project for Sage, though of course we don't want to deviate from upstream unless necessary. This includes C/C++ libraries that we wrote for Sage like libgap. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
