On Wednesday, March 25, 2015 at 4:20:21 PM UTC+1, Nils Bruin wrote: > > > The git source repository does not contain all the upstream tarballs, so > if you first download that, you'll get something a little bit smaller. If > you build from that, then the upstream tarballs will be downloaded as > needed. Unfortunately for your purposes, the build process is set up so > that each package is "needed", so all of them will be downloaded. > > In principle you could tweak the build process to skip certain packages. > You would certainly end up with an unsupported build and quite likely with > a non-functioning one, but with a bit of work you can probably cull > *something* (e.g., R comes to mind. That's not very tightly integrated, so > missing that will probably not have a huge impact). > > So the simple answer is "No", the encouraging answer is "Yes, but you'd > have to do nontrivial work to ensure that not every package is demanded > during build already, and you'd be setting yourself up with an untested and > thus a very unreliable setup". > On Wednesday, March 25, 2015 at 4:53:55 PM UTC+1, William wrote: > > > What functionality do you need? If you tell us, maybe it's actually > just in some program that we include, and you can use that program > directly. For example, if you said, "I need to compute the class > group of a number field", we might respond with "install PARI". >
Thank you both for the replies and explanations. It is surprising to me, however, that different packages cannot be tested and installed independently and need to be built all together to be sure everything will work. Somehow in most programming languages i know about (Ruby, Python, Racket, Haskell, etc) and in TeX distributions (TeX Live, etc.), and even in text editors (Vim, TextMate, etc) this is not the case: you can install packages, and sometimes even uninstall them (TeX Live is not good at this), any time. I am not very familiar with Sage, i didn't know that i can install some subprogram without installing Sage itself. Would i still be able to use worksheets? I want to have Sage installed for personal experimentations, but the exponential growth of the size of distribution scares me, and i am sure i would only use a small part of it. I would like to have the packages for linear algebra, symbolic integration, limits and series, and maybe ordinary differential equations. Besides that, i have discovered that my university makes engineering students do some "practical work" for their math classes with old Maple (V Release 5), and i am trying to convince them to use Sage or some other open source alternative. (Actually, i am asked to teach now one of this "practical" classes.) Thank you for your help. Alexey. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-support" 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 http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
