Hi William, On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 4:43 PM, William Stein <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 7:34 AM, Erik Bray <[email protected]> wrote: >> It should also technically be possible (I haven't tried it yet, but I >> intend to) to install sage into a conda environment by setting >> $SAGE_LOCAL to the path to that environment. My bet is that there are >> unknown bumps in the path, but that would be the general idea. > > My impression is that Anaconda is basically meant to solve the same > problem as "Sage the distribution", except that (1) it was started > later, (2) has way more funding, (3) is focused on scientific > software, (4) they are fully committed to it being a package manager, > whereas often Sage developers will say our package manager is not a > package manager, as an excuse for it not being very good in some ways.
You are absolutely correct on points (1) through (3). (4) is half right and half opinion, though I don't disagree with the opinion part :) (granted it's not a fair comparison either but it is what it is). > Thus: it would be really cool to investigate further integration with > or leveraging of Anaconda for Sage! It would be cool if you or > anybody else did so. Agreed--I think in principle it would be the easiest way to get Sage on Windows and OSX. The major roadblock would be getting all of Sage's existing dependencies packaged for conda*. Many of them are already there, many aren't. And of course that says nothing for those dependencies that don't (yet) work natively on the platforms that conda supports. Erik * A point of clarification for those who are unfamiliar with conda/Anaconda. Anaconda itself is a scientific Python distribution, and didn't necessarily start as a package management system either. However, the way Anaconda was built required some kind of package management anyways, much akin to Sage the distribution--that is--it was necessary to manage the dependencies between software included in Anaconda, how to build and install all that software, and the occasional patches for platform support and build issues. The Anaconda project quickly split out the "package management" aspect into a separate project called just "conda", which is both the package manager and the name of the command one uses to control the package manager. Since then "conda" has become the core of Anaconda, and is in many senses more fundamental. Now, when one installs "Anaconda", they are installing "conda" along with a conda meta-package called "Anaconda" that consists of Python (2 or 3) and the core scientific Python software that originally made up the Anaconda distribution. But one can package just about any other code for conda and install it in addition to the "Anaconda" core software. P.P.S. This is probably something Sage-the-distribution should have done long ago, but I know I'm far from the first to say that, and totally understand that the resources haven't been there. It's not a trivial undertaking. It might almost be worth rebuilding Sage's packaging on top of the conda platform, so that we can eliminate a lot of the overhead of developing a packaging system alongside sage. But the devil is of course in the details, and I could also understand any wariness over depending on a third-party system, over which we don't have full control, for Sage-the-distribution's packaging. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
