Get Sage ready for Debian

[Alex Spitzer]

Hello all,

I am an undergraduate currently studying computer science at Cornell University and I am interested in working on the Sage project involving the use of system built libraries for Debian. I have done most of my programming in Python and C++ and have experience working with source packages on a Linux system (mostly through LFS), so I believe this project will be a good fit for me.

Would it be correct to say that this project is analagous to a configure script? That is, the system installed libraries that Sage depends on will be identified and then linked to during the build process instead of just bringing in everything we need with Sage.

Any advice or suggestions as to how to prepare for this project would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Alex Spitzer

[Julien Puydt]

Hi,

I'm a would-be mentor on a project which would be a about debian & sage.

Le 11/04/2013 04:25, Alex Spitzer a �crit :

Do you have some experience with debian packaging? With various build
systems (autotools, scons, setuptools, etc)?

We only have a rough idea what is to be done and how ; my guess is that
you should have a look at and participate in the discussions on the
sage-devel mailing-list.

Thanks for your interest,

Snark on #debian-science and #sagemath

[tha...@debian.org]

Hi,

I'm also a mentor for this project and from now on I will send all other interested students to this thread. :P

As Julien said, the exact course of action for this project is still to be determined, so if you have ideas yourself: they are very welcome! We are currently discussing ideas in the thread [1] on sage-devel. There, we distinguish "Sage the system" as the complete bundle you install and "Sage the library", the original math code provided by Sage. This project will involve the build processes of both these things to some extend.

You can familiarize yourself with the build system of Sage the system by looking at the top-level Makefile and the file spkg/install in the Sage sources. spkg/install starts building all the packages that are bundled with sage, called spkg's.

The Sage library is in the spkg spkg/standard/sage-$version.spkg. Extract it (tar -jxvf sage-5.*.spkg) and figure out how it is built. Which build system is used for the Python library, which one for c_lib? Which technology does Sage use to execute Python code faster? An important goal is that this library gets suppport to be built on a Linux system where most of the programs that come in spkg/standard are installed via the distributions package manager. (On Debian, many of them are already available, see [2].)

It would good if you try to contribute to the discussion [1]. And don't hesitate to ask if something is unclear!

Cheers,
Tobias

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/sage-devel/1HGbf4EZGb0
[2] http://people.debian.org/~thansen/debian-sage-status.html