Sage optional package installs are very fragile -- need improvement or alternative

[sagetrac-ijstokes]

I just tried installing a bunch of optional packages, not surprisingly (for me) I used:

for pkg in pkg1 pkg2 ... pkgN; do
sage -i $pkg
done | tee pkg-install.log

Some of these packages didn't install properly. No problem, I thought. I won't use them or I'll try to fix them later.

No such luck. My sage build is screwed, and I'm told there is no good way to back-out the install. It is hard to believe that the build/install process doesn't check that the package(s) built properly before putting them into Sage (lib, bin, site-packages, etc.) directories, but I'm told this is true. There appears to be no reliable way for me to back these out now.

What is the request? Either 1) that the process is improved to avoid this situation; or ii) that an alternative package management system is put in place. For the second point, someone provided me a link to this April 2011 sage-devel discussion topic:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/sage-devel/XFJn3jGVBG8/discussion

Thanks,

Ian

Component: build

Reviewer: Jeroen Demeyer

Issue created by migration from https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/11484

[sagetrac-ijstokes]

comment:1

There was some discussion about this on #sagemath and wstein explained how this didn't even make sense, since an SPKG could do "rm -Rf /". I assume that any SPKG that is included as one of the listed optional or experimental SPKGs has gone through at least some kind of installation test before it is added to that list. If that is the case, then my suggestions can be condensed to these two points:

1. That all listed packages (optional and experimental) have a trial install on at least one common Linux variant and one common OS X version (10.5 or 10.6). This would prevent the "rm -Rf /" type of SPKG being listed.

2. That there be some kind of "uninstall" process to remove a package. If a single uninstall command is too much, then a documented process that is better than "read the SPKG details and work backwards" would still be helpful.

Ian

[jdemeyer]

comment:3

You need to specify which package is problematic, otherwise this ticket will need to be closed as invalid because it's too vague.

[jdemeyer]

Reviewer: Jeroen Demeyer