On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 4:31 AM, Erik Bray <[email protected]> wrote:

> I don't particularly care what the default is but the point here in
> the first place is that it shouldn't try to build and install its own
> gcc if one doesn't explicitly ask for it, opting instead to report
> what dependencies were missing such that sage couldn't be built.
>
> I think Simon's point was that if it can be made to work that way for
> gcc why stop there?  Admittedly gcc is a special case.  But one way or
> another it would be good in general to have more control over what
> packages Sage automatically builds and installs, as opposed to
> requiring dependencies from the system--this is nothing new.

"This is nothing new" for **most** projects.  For Sage this is.  From
the very beginning I took an unusual approach to the Sage build system
for various reasons -- mainly, so that mathematicians -- rather than
software engineers -- could actually help with development.

I remembered very clearly that it took me days of work just to get all
the standard deps of Sage (in 2005) to build and work in a
self-contained way using the "it's nothing new standard approach".
Since I'm more experienced with software than most math people, it was
clear that using the standard approach would be a recipe for certain
failure with the project.   I was right.

Obviously, it is about time we support a standard build process.
There's no technical reason that we can't have both approaches to
building Sage, except that it's probably way harder than having just
one approach (it's really hard to do one thing well, let alone 2
things...).   But with experienced people like Erik and Jereon doing
so much, I'm very optimistic that we can support two approaches well
now.

 -- William



-- 
William (http://wstein.org)

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"sage-release" 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-release.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to