Is it a pity that Debian is not notifying upstream(s) of such improvements straight away.
Just telling us that an update was done and the patches can be extacted from such and such place would already be great.
mind you, the relevant Sage ticket is more that 6 months old:
https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/20914
I posted the relevant comment there.
well, on top of this we have our own little war with GAP people who force us to maintain a fork :-)
Debian should have tried offering their patches (or help) to upstream first, and only then resorted to do patching libGAP on their own, and not the other way around.
I understand that in situations where upstream is basically dead this mihgt have been OK, but this is emphatically not the case here.
On Sunday, January 22, 2017 at 10:31:45 AM UTC, Tobias Hansen wrote:
Good or bad, GAP people maintain that libGAP is a fork of GAP.
And the upstream of libGAP is here:
https://bitbucket.org/vbraun/libgap
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> I (and Debian mostly) take the view that a software package is a "unit of maintenance". The libGAP authors do not maintain the GAP source code so I don't consider GAP as part of its source code. In other words, I consider it to be just the patches.
We do maintain the libGAP, whether it is a set of patches or not is irrelevant.
And for you guys libgap *is* a package:
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-science/packages/libgap-sage.git/
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> I would *guess* that Jerome has not made any significant changes to the patches, since if he had, he should have submitted them upstream. Or, perhaps the situation with GAP makes it a bit awkward to do this.
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> However if by "[our] libGAP patches" you mean the simple act of importing the latest GAP version into libGAP then I would *guess* that this was trivial to do (as Tobias also guessed), because otherwise Jerome would have already submitted them upstream. Really, he is very good with these sorts of things, he has been submitting patches to cysignals, as Jeroen knows, and various other projects.
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> If he did not do this, I would *guess* it is because Sage is still using 4.8.3 and it is unlikely libGAP would have merged his conflict resolutions until a much later date - and we had some Debian deadlines to meet in December.
I am sure that if in November 2016 work has been done to update libGAP in Sage, for sure 7.5 would have contained these updates.
Mind you, it is 15K of very tricky C code, its own (nontrivial too - you need to build a dynamical library) build system, tests, and machinery to patch the pristine GAP source.
AFAICS, Debian does quite a bit of changes to the build system and tests at least.