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

[Stefan Husmann]

Am 14.08.2010 05:14, schrieb 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.
> 
> 

The users of sage will not be peeved about that, because it is very well 
known that this is the case. Or if they are, will not use sage.

Regards Stefan