remove sage from debian?

[Harald Schilly]

Hello, I'm monitoring the "report a bug" link in the Sage notebooks.
More and more reports about sage in debian/ubuntu come in, reporting
that various functions and components don't work. I think some have
the impression that Sage doesn't progress and is broken ...

So, is there a way to remove it? Or move it to back into a testing or
experimental stage? It would also be nice to update the package with
something, that tells all users to get an update from sagemath.org,
since it is outdated and doesn't work.

harald

[Tim Abbott]

It's already only available in Debian unstable within Debian, which is the
standard thing done in Debian for software that has just entered..

I suspect the problem is that Ubuntu syncs from Debian unstable, ignoring
packages marked as not to enter any actual release (such as sagemath), and
most people are using Ubuntu. It is hard to get packages removed from
Ubuntu once they make it into a release, so we're stuck for Jaunty and
Karmic. Lucid (the upcoming LTS) will sync off Debian testing, and thus
probably will not include a sagemath package unless someone takes action
to make that happen.

Honestly, it seems to me a better plan to actually get the version in
Debian updated; I think that much less work is required than you might
think. But I have basically no time, so I can't deal myself.

-Tim Abbott

[Harald Schilly]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 19:43, Tim Abbott <tab...@mit.edu> wrote:
> I suspect the problem is that Ubuntu syncs from Debian unstable, ignoring

> packages marked as not to enter any actual release ...

Thanks for the explanation! I just want to bring this issue on the
table in this group, because there is no communication channel to all
those who use the sagemath package to tell them to use the more recent
official package. Anyways, thanks for your initial effort to bring
sage into debian and hopefully sometime in the future it will be
updated ;)

H

[C.M. Connelly]

"HS" == Harald Schilly <harald....@gmail.com>

HS> Thanks for the explanation! I just want to bring this
HS> issue on the table in this group, because there is no
HS> communication channel to all those who use the sagemath
HS> package to tell them to use the more recent official
HS> package. Anyways, thanks for your initial effort to bring
HS> sage into debian and hopefully sometime in the future it
HS> will be updated ;)

There's nothing stopping you from following up on the bug to say
just that.

However, packages that are part of the distro *are*, from a user's
perspective, the official packages, however broken. SAGE's own
packages are not going to be supported by the distro people, and
if the SAGE team can't get the distro maintainers to update their
packages, then they should probably ask the distro maintainers to
withdraw the packages from the distro.

If there's really no way to get things working on Debian, you
could ask the package maintainers to get the ftpmaster to move the
packages to experimental (and out of unstable). For Ubuntu, you'd
have to contact the Ubnuntu package maintainers.

Also, if people are reporting bugs in distro packages to SAGE
rather than to their distro, then they should be gently redirected
to report those bugs against their distro package, where the
distro's maintainers can (1) fix any problems related to packaging
without involving upstream, and (2) report other problems upstream
in a coordinated way.

Claire

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Claire Connelly c...@math.hmc.edu
Systems Administrator (909) 621-8754
Department of Mathematics Harvey Mudd College
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*