New contributor experience

[Jerry James]

Greetings,

I help out with maintaining the sagemath package and many of its dependencies for the Fedora Linux distribution.  While performing maintenance activities, I have produced a handful of patches that I would like to submit to you.

I found http://www.sagemath.org/development.html.  The 2nd and 3rd bullets in the list ("SageMath FAQ" and "How to contribute to SageMath", respectively) go to the same place.  That's because the 3rd bullet points to the first entry on the page pointed to by the 2nd bullet.  I found this distinction more confusing than helpful.  (My reaction on clicking the 3rd link was, "Wait, I just read this page!  Did I accidentally click on the 2nd bullet again?".  Click on the back button.  Click on the 3rd bullet again.  No, same place.  Let's look at the URLs.  Ohhhh.)  I recommend you eliminate one of the two.

I started working my way through the Sage Developer's Guide.  Near the top, under the bullet named "Git (revision control)", is a link to http://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/developer/walk_through.html#chapter-walkthrough named "Here is an overview of our development flow".  The third paragraph on the linked page says, "You can alternatively fork and create a pull request at github which will automatically fetch your code and open a ticket on our trac server."  Oh, that's great!  So I went to https://github.com/sagemath/sage, where at the top it clearly says, "Mirror of the Sage source tree -- please do not submit PRs here -- everything must be submitted via https://trac.sagemath.org/".  Wait, that contradicts what I just read in the walkthrough, doesn't it?  Did I fail to understand something?

I ignored the part about pull requests and worked my way through the rest of the guide.  I filed trivial ticket 28124 just to make sure I understand the workflow before moving on.  It would be great if the bit about pull requests could be clarified, though.  If that really works, that would make submitting patches much simpler for me.

Thanks for making such a great piece of software.

-- Jerry James

[Samuel Lelievre]

Dear Jerry,

thanks for reporting. We should make the change you suggest.

At some point we had a bot that transformed pull requests

on the SageMath repo at *GitHub* into Sage Trac tickets but

the code for this bot was lost at some point.

Instead we now have a bot that transforms merge requests

on the SageMath repo at *GitLab* into Sage Trac tickets:

    https://gitlab.com/sagemath/sage

The process is the same as with GitHub, the only difference

being that GitLab calls "merge request" what GitHub calls

"pull request". Fork the repository, make changes on your fork,

create a merge request.

We should update the documentation to reflect that.

Samuel

[Jerry James]

On Saturday, July 6, 2019 at 4:54:45 AM UTC-6, Samuel Lelievre wrote:

Dear Jerry,

thanks for reporting. We should make the change you suggest.

At some point we had a bot that transformed pull requests

on the SageMath repo at *GitHub* into Sage Trac tickets but

the code for this bot was lost at some point.

Instead we now have a bot that transforms merge requests

on the SageMath repo at *GitLab* into Sage Trac tickets:

    https://gitlab.com/sagemath/sage

The process is the same as with GitHub, the only difference

being that GitLab calls "merge request" what GitHub calls

"pull request". Fork the repository, make changes on your fork,

create a merge request.

We should update the documentation to reflect that.

Samuel

Okay, that is good to know.  At this point, I am already set up to use git trac, so I will continue down that path.  Thank you for the reply!  Regards,

-- 

Jerry James 

[Samuel Lelièvre]

Sun 2019-07-07 03:20 UTC, Jerry James:

>
> Okay, that is good to know. At this point, I am already set up to use git trac,
> so I will continue down that path. Thank you for the reply! Regards,

I opened a pull request for improving the links to the FAQ:

- Clarify links to FAQ
https://github.com/sagemath/website/pull/169

Thanks for your involvement in packaging SageMath for Fedora,
and for alerting to the confusing links and statements in the
developer page on the website and in the developer guide.

I'll try to straighten out the bit about GitHub pull requests now.

Samuel

[Vincent Delecroix]

Dear Jerry,

If you succeed in packaging for Fedora, the SageMath installation
guide should be updated accordingly. More precisely the two pages

https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/index.html
https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/linux.html

Best
Vincent

[Jerry James]

On Sunday, July 7, 2019 at 4:47:13 AM UTC-6, vdelecroix wrote:

If you succeed in packaging for Fedora, the SageMath installation
guide should be updated accordingly. More precisely the two pages

https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/index.html
https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/linux.html 

 

Actually, we do have sagemath in Fedora already.  There have been some issues with it, but we've been working to clean those up and give our users a good experience.  One issue, for example, is that Fedora started removing python 2 around the end of 2018.  So many packages that sagemath needs were removed that we were left with no choice but to switch to python 3 for Fedora 30.  That's been a little rough, but it is getting better with every sagemath release.  We appreciate all the work the sagemath community has been doing to make that transition happen.

I'm not sure how to contribute text to the two pages you mentioned.  There has been a sagemath package in some form or other since Fedora 18, so perhaps "Fedora >= 18" could be added to https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/index.html?

As for https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/linux.html, the command "sudo dnf install sagemath" will install almost everything.  For some reason it leaves out the notebook exporter; that should perhaps be considered a bug.  The command "sudo dnf install sagemath-notebook-export" will install that.  The English documentation (sagemath-doc-en) is installed by default.  Documentation for other languages can be installed with "sudo dnf install sagemath-doc-XX" for suitable values of XX (ca, de, fr, hu, it, pt, ru, and tr).

Regards,

Jerry James

[Dima Pasechnik]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 5:40 AM Jerry James <logan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sunday, July 7, 2019 at 4:47:13 AM UTC-6, vdelecroix wrote:
>>
>> If you succeed in packaging for Fedora, the SageMath installation
>> guide should be updated accordingly. More precisely the two pages
>>
>> https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/index.html
>> https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/linux.html
>
>
> Actually, we do have sagemath in Fedora already. There have been some issues with it, but we've been working to clean those up and give our users a good experience. One issue, for example, is that Fedora started removing python 2 around the end of 2018. So many packages that sagemath needs were removed that we were left with no choice but to switch to python 3 for Fedora 30. That's been a little rough, but it is getting better with every sagemath release. We appreciate all the work the sagemath community has been doing to make that transition happen.
>
> I'm not sure how to contribute text to the two pages you mentioned. There has been a sagemath package in some form or other since Fedora 18, so perhaps "Fedora >= 18" could be added to https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/index.html?

the source of these docs is in src/doc/en/installation/, so this is
done in the usual Sagemath way.

>
> As for https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/linux.html, the command "sudo dnf install sagemath" will install almost everything. For some reason it leaves out the notebook exporter; that should perhaps be considered a bug. The command "sudo dnf install sagemath-notebook-export" will install that. The English documentation (sagemath-doc-en) is installed by default. Documentation for other languages can be installed with "sudo dnf install sagemath-doc-XX" for suitable values of XX (ca, de, fr, hu, it, pt, ru, and tr).
>
> Regards,
> Jerry James
>

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[Samuel Lelièvre]

Le mer. 10 juil. 2019 à 04:40, Jerry James <logan...@gmail.com> a écrit :
>
> Actually, we do have sagemath in Fedora already. There have been some
> issues with it, but we've been working to clean those up and give our users
> a good experience. One issue, for example, is that Fedora started removing
> python 2 around the end of 2018. So many packages that sagemath needs
> were removed that we were left with no choice but to switch to python 3 for
> Fedora 30. That's been a little rough, but it is getting better with every
> sagemath release. We appreciate all the work the sagemath community
> has been doing to make that transition happen.

It would be nice if you could join the sage-packaging mailing list
which is dedicated to discussing good practice and problems
related to packaging SageMath for various distributions.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sage-packaging

Thanks in advance!
Samuel