Making a quick multi-user sagemath install using conda

[Nils Bruin]

I ran into the following scenario:

A multi-user machine running a rather old but still supported linux distribution that doesn't have sufficient prereqs to build and install sage from source: I tried sage-the-distribution, but while "bootstrap/configure" succeeded, gmp didn't want to build, probably due to gcc being outdated.

So at that point I figured trying conda would be worthwhile. Because conda is *designed*  to work around lack of admin privileges, it is actually not so clear from the instructions how to use conda to install a piece of software for multi-user usage. It's quite doable to get conda to put their install director in a location that is not in a homedir, but conda *really* wants to write stuff into your .bashrc (and obviously, I wouldn't want every user to have to do that!)

However, it seems like with the conda install completed,

/opt/sage/miniforge3/envs/sage/bin/sage

seems to start sage just fine, even without setting up the required conda environment. It looks like the normal "sage" setup seems to do enough: after "sage -sh" I'm getting from "gcc -v" the conda-forge gcc rather than the outdated "gcc".

I'd imagine there may be a way of generating a sage start-up script that would properly set up the conda environment before running sage, but as far as I've tested, that's not even necessary.

It's a very quick way for getting sage installed, so perhaps there's merit to getting a scenario like this more properly documented/supported.

[François Bissey]

I have performed quite a few system wide conda installs to provide jupyterhub in the past.
I usually started with a miniconda/minimamba as root in /opt/minconda.
Only root can install conda packages but that's a given for a multi-user install that not everyone should be able to modify the environment - unless you really want to by design.

You can make it available on the login shell to individual users by adding a file with the correct path under /etc/profile.d/ that or an activation method via a script.

François

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