Behavior of optional packages

[enriqu...@gmail.com]

I am not sure if the subject reflects exactly what I mean but I have just seen a change of behavior. It is maybe intended but I do not see it reflected in the documentation or I did not know how to look for it.

I use quite often the optional package sirocco. It was installed in my develop branch at worked flawlessly. I needed to make some computations yesterday and the system failed to find some packages in sage.libs.

I tried to uninstall and reinstall, even make distclean without success; installing with sage -i sirocco or make sirocco did not work (it installed it but libs were not found). 

The solution was to apply first ./configure --enable-sagemath_sirocco.

Was it produced by some change? 

In the same lines, make doc-pdf produced a couple of errors in a new system concerning xindy and free_fonts. I will start probably a PR to put the actual packages that work in Fedora. After installing them the error persisted and it only disappeared after a ./configure. Maybe this hint in the logs of somewhere in the documentation would help.

Thanks, Enrique.

[Dima Pasechnik]

Yes, this is a recent change.
It's time to retire "sage -i".

Dima

[enriqu...@gmail.com]

Thanks. Is it documented somewhere?

[David Coudert]

I'm also not able to find the documentation of the best way to install optional packages.

It would be nice to know all the steps to install each specific package. I assume that the steps are not the same for all optional packages since some of them are pip installable and others are not.

Thanks,

David.

[Matthias Koeppe]

Yes, this is a change made in this release cycle. 

See https://github.com/sagemath/sage/wiki/Sage-10.4-Release-Tour#configuration-changes

[Louis Deaett]

If I may, I'd like to ask you to expand on this comment:

> It's time to retire "sage -i".

Why do you say that?  And what specifically would be the replacement?

Please forgive my ignorance; I am currently involved in an effort to package some code for Sage, and if there are changes coming to how that works, it would help us to get ahead of those!

Thanks,

Louis

[Dima Pasechnik]

On 18 July 2024 20:05:39 BST, Louis Deaett <louis....@gmail.com> wrote:
>If I may, I'd like to ask you to expand on this comment:
>
>> It's time to retire "sage -i".
>
>Why do you say that? And what specifically would be the replacement?

./configure + make

Specifically, to make sure package foo is installed,

./configure --enable-foo && make build

Or

make foo && make build

These have been around for years, and "sage -f foo"
is a wrapper around these.

If on the other hand you want to install a PyPI package foo (no matter whether it is a Sage package or not) into Sage venv, you can do

./sage --pip install foo

(this is not too safe, as this may update already installed Sage packages, so use with a caution)

Nowadays there is also a mostly undocumented sagemath_environment thing - some packages need to be installed with it, but don't ask me how or why.

HTH
Dima

[Matthias Koeppe]

I have opened https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/38387, which intends to make "configure --enable-SPKG" work for "pip" packages.

This will need some careful testing.