[aur-general] Proposal to move sage-mathematics into [community].

[Loui Chang]

On Sat 14 Aug 2010 04:31 +0200, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:
>  On 14.08.2010 03:46, Xyne wrote:
> >> I didn't modularize this package because upstream doesn't intend to
> >> modularize it, and because of the amount of work that would require, not
> >> only to split everything off, but to make sure nothing breaks at the same
> >> time.
> >> Case in point, http://github.com/cschwan/sage-on-gentoo
> >>
> >> I would like to start discussing its inclusion now.
> >
> > I fully agree with the sentiments regarding duplication of packages,
> > but that is an upstream issue and unavoidable without a very
> > heavy-hands-on approach to the package, as already mentioned. The
> > package itself though is more than just a mesh of its components and
> > thus provides a real utility despite the underlying duplication.
> >
> > In the absence of an upstream willingness to modularize the components,
> > the next best approach would be to have the package "provide" as many
> > of its components as possible (if any) to enable users to avoid
> > redundant packages on their own system. This would offset the cost of
> > the duplication and reduce user-mirror bandwidth and user diskspace. The
> > cost of the extra bits on the mirrors themselves is unfortunate but far
> > from critical.
>
> If I have understood your correctly, you want sage to provide python and
> all its other components as if they were vanilla?
>
> I have no experience at all with sage but your idea sounds like it would
> invite a lot of very hard to debug breakage. From my understanding, the
> duplicated packages that sage would provide are heavily modified. How
> can you expect them to behave like their vanilla versions without
> extensive testing?

It seems pretty ridiculous that they wouldn't have made provisions to
use a system python rather than a bundled one. I maintain brlcad which
bundles tcl/tk, boost, and a host of other libs but they have a proper
build system which can check for and use system libs. Some of the libs
are more obscure and probably should be bundled. I can imagine the same
situation would occur with sage-mathematics. I'm left wondering why sage
can't get their modifications incorporated upstream.

I don't imagine using sage any time soon, but I can imagine users being
a little peeved if they required virtually two installations of python -
or any other major package.