Misleading message from sage

[Marc Culler]

I think it would be good to replace misleading messages in sage by accurate messages. I offer as an example the following message which occurs if I run sage after first running:

   export DOT_SAGE="~/Library/Application Support/SageMath-10-4""

The message I got was:

  Your home directory has a space in it.  This
  will probably break some functionality of Sage.  E.g.,
  the GAP interface will not work. A workaround
  is to set the environment variable HOME to a
  directory with no spaces that you have write
  permissions to before you start sage.

It is false that my home directory has a space in it, and consequently setting HOME to a different directory will not solve any problems.  So the first and third sentences are complete garbage.

I would like to know if the second sentence is true.  I ran sage -gap using that value of DOT_SAGE and it seemed to work fine.  Does it really matter to GAP whether DOT_SAGE contains a space? If so, where should I be looking for this broken functionality?  Is it correct to interpret "GAP interface" to mean what you get when you run  "sage -gap"?

- Marc

PS I am asking because I would like to follow the Python convention of using the "~/Library/Application Support" directory as the location of user-installed pip packages installed with sage -pip.  I would also like to arrange for the macOS sage app to organize sage's user-installed pip packages by Sage version, not by python version. Multiple versions of sage (e.g. 10.2 and 10.3) may use the same python version, but that does not mean that the they should share pip packages.

[Dima Pasechnik]

On 1 July 2024 21:32:10 BST, Marc Culler <marc....@gmail.com> wrote:
>I think it would be good to replace misleading messages in sage by accurate
>messages. I offer as an example the following message which occurs if I run
>sage after first running:
> export DOT_SAGE="~/Library/Application Support/SageMath-10-4""
>
>The message I got was:
>
> Your home directory has a space in it. This
> will probably break some functionality of Sage. E.g.,
> the GAP interface will not work. A workaround
> is to set the environment variable HOME to a
> directory with no spaces that you have write
> permissions to before you start sage.
>
>It is false that my home directory has a space in it, and consequently
>setting HOME to a different directory will not solve any problems. So the
>first and third sentences are complete garbage.
>
>I would like to know if the second sentence is true. I ran sage -gap using
>that value of DOT_SAGE and it seemed to work fine. Does it really matter
>to GAP whether DOT_SAGE contains a space? If so, where should I be looking
>for this broken functionality? Is it correct to interpret "GAP interface"
>to mean what you get when you run "sage -gap"?

Not only this. Also, libgap, and GAP packages might have an issue with this. It used to be a problem in the past, for sure.

Try installing gap_packages and run tests.

Dima