[flint2] feature request - linking with ntl

[Dima Pasechnik]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 5:06 AM Peter Jeremy <peter at rulingia.com> wrote:
>
> On 2019-Feb-12 20:47:15 +0000, Dima Pasechnik <dimpase+freebsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> >Flint2 can be linked with ntl, providing more capabilities.
>
> Apart from being a prerequisite for sagemath, what additional capabilities
> does flint2 gain from being linked with ntl?

It's not merely a minor technical thing.
It provides conversion between flint2 and ntl data, see
https://github.com/wbhart/flint2/blob/trunk/interfaces/doc/interfaces.txt
It  is a reasonably general and useful feature, and it is about 400
lines of C++.

Yes, indeed, it prevents Sagemath from using flint2 from ports
>
> >Is this a reasonable request to ask for flint2 to be linked with ntl
> >and available in such a configuration by default?
>
> IMO, ntl should be an optional dependency.  Whether it should default to
> being "on" depends on the benefits gained from including it.

I must say I am not too familiar with optional dependencies in ports.
It would be fine it e.g. pkg can detect that ntl is already installed,
and provide flint2
linked against ntl, but I don't know if this is/can be  implemented.

The main setback with this option on is that libflint.so file will be
bigger in size (probably because C++-related ABI is not too small),
but we're talking about extra 10-15 Mb or so.

Thanks,
Dima

>
> --
> Peter Jeremy