Sage-4.0.2 running notebook from the command line

[Robert Miller]

I tried running the Sage notebook as follows, from SAGE_ROOT/devel/
sage-main:

$ ../../sage -notebook

And I get the following error:

Please wait while the Sage Notebook server starts...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/rlmill/sage-4.0.2/local/bin/sage-notebook", line 9, in
<module>
from sage.server.notebook.all import notebook
File "/Users/rlmill/sage-4.0.2/devel/sage-main/sage/server/notebook/
all.py", line 15, in <module>
from notebook_object import notebook, inotebook
File "/Users/rlmill/sage-4.0.2/devel/sage-main/sage/server/notebook/
notebook_object.py", line 19, in <module>
import notebook as _notebook
File "/Users/rlmill/sage-4.0.2/devel/sage-main/sage/server/notebook/
notebook.py", line 22, in <module>
from sage.structure.sage_object import SageObject, load
ImportError: No module named sage_object

Can anyone reproduce this?

[William Stein]

In python imports are relative by default, so "import sage" does not
mean what you think. I think long ago I hacked around this problem
for just typing "sage" to start sage, by making it change to a
different directory during startup. (I vaguely recall doing that
specifically to get Sage to work on Cygwin, actually.)

So I think the above should be considered a bug, and you should
definitely report it to trac. Probably the fix is to change the
directory during part of Sage startup, to thwart Python's relative
import system.

William

[Robert Miller]

PS - I'm on a MacBook running OS 10.5.7, and

sage: notebook()

works fine.

[Nick Alexander]

These recent path errors have bitten me too; always, the solution has
been to run the programs from a different directory. Looks like we
need to get to the bottom of this.

Nick

[John Cremona]

2009/6/22 Nick Alexander <ncale...@gmail.com>:

This sounds like the same thing which makes sage -merge fail if you do
it from SAGE_ROOT/devel/sage-clone

John

>
> Nick
>
> >
>

[Robert Miller]

http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/6385

[William Stein]

Python has always worked this way.

The problem is that if you're in a directory and it contains a
directory foo (with a file __init__.py in it), and you type into a
python session "import foo", then the code in the directory foo is
imported, even if there happens to also be a foo in site-packages.
The code in the local directory takes precedence. In the above
example, there's no sage_object, since it's a Cython module, so the
.so file doesn't exist in the sage directory (it's in the
site-packages directory).

-- William