Worst SPKG ever!

Well, in case you don't get the Simpsons reference about Comic Book Guy's catch phrase you might want to read those two links. But to get back to the point of this post: I spend about 6 hours or so on ticket #1852. It looked very harmless, i.e. just enable ATLAS during the configure phase and fix some other odd issues, but it turned out to be the worst spkg I ever had to fix. No need to name names here since the subject of this post is mostly tongue in cheek by now. While I did work on the spkg I did feel differently, but those things had a tendency to fade into the background once I have moved on to other things.

Do I blame the person who initially did create the spkg in question? Not really, since we are all busy people and I also had to read the R build manual to fix some of the issues I saw. It was just surprising that this particular spkg was quite bad compared to all the other ones, i.e. we installed about 60 mb unneeded object files somewhere in SAGE_LOCAL and those do add up for the final download size. I am just glad it is done and now I could start bitching about gsl 1.10, see #1623. Since that one is done, too, now it is on to #1631 and then who knows what. So, sooner or later there will be another "Worst SPKG ever!" and this one will be a distant memory ;)

Cheers,

Michael