Install some dummy and optional packages using conda-forge (micromamba)

[mkoeppe]

📚 Description

sage -i pandoc or make pandoc will now use micromamba to install the package into an isolated conda environment in $SAGE_LOCAL/var/lib/sage/conda.
Likewise for the other dummy packages.

We also reduce normal optional packages info, valgrind, rubiks to conda-installed packages.

This reduces platform support for these optional packages to the platforms supported by conda-forge / micromamba, in particular, it drops support for 32-bit Linux. See:

• Meta-ticket: Remove support for outdated distros #32074

This is the first step toward:

• SPKG that only build executables or data: Replace spkg-install by conda #35583

📝 Checklist

• The title is concise, informative, and self-explanatory.
• The description explains in detail what this PR is about.
• I have linked a relevant issue or discussion.
• I have created tests covering the changes.
• I have updated the documentation accordingly.

⌛ Dependencies

[isuruf]

Would this work for the 3-manifolds binary distribution? You might want to use micromamba instead of mambaforge to make it better for 3-manifolds build.

[mkoeppe]

Thanks! https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide/micromamba.html indeed looks like a better choice.

[mkoeppe]

Would this work for the 3-manifolds binary distribution?

@culler Could you take a look if this breaks anything for your distro build?

[culler]

Thank you for checking!

I checked my last build of 10.0.rc0. When I look in logs/pkgs I do not see log files for packages named conda, micromamba, info, or rubiks. I also do not see any of those packages in local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.11.1/var/lib/sage/installed or local/var/lib/sage/installed. I think that means that we are not building any of those packages, and therefore will not be affected by any changes to those packages.

We don't support sage -i so changes to sage -i pandoc will not affect us. And we do not run make pandoc.

I see changes to bootstrap and Makefile.in. Potentially those will cause trouble, of course, but I do not see anything obviously problematic.

There are changes to sage-env but I have to patch that anyway. I would rather not change my patch, but I can do that if forced to and I don't think I will have to. I see that conda has been added as a dependency to several packages, including ffmpeg and imagemagick. But as far as I can tell we are not building those either.

Are there some other places where I should be looking?

[mkoeppe]

I do not see log files for packages named conda, micromamba

This branch has not been merged yet!

[mkoeppe]

The packages info, valgrind, rubiks are the only three affected by this branch that could be installed before using Sage scripts, and will be installed using conda after this PR.

Sounds like this PR won't have a direct effect on your distribution.
But if we go forward with this approach, at some point we will hit optional packages that you do install. (For example, I briefly had latte_int in the list of packages that this PR changes in the same way, but for now I've backed it out again.)

[culler]

I was not reporting that as an error. I was reporting it as evidence that we have not built those packages in any previous release, and therefore can be hopeful that changes to them will not affect our build..

[culler]

Our guiding principle has been that we include every optional package which (1) we are able to build and (2) cannot be installed with pip. So removing packages which we currently install will be fine as long as those packages can be installed with pip. On the other hand, breaking optional packages which build without problems and run fine, but cannot be installed with pip, will make our distribution worse. I don't know why you would want to do that, though.

Maybe you could give me an idea of which packages you are referring to. What would be the reason for getting rid of your example package, latte_int?

[mkoeppe]

We're not removing packages. We're replacing the custom installation script by a general installation script that uses conda for the installation.
The reason for that is to reduce the maintenance effort for packages on our side.
I've put a list of candidate packages for this in #35583.

[github-actions]

Documentation preview for this PR (built with commit 3193b87; changes) is ready! 🎉