Packaging again sagemath

[Giovanni Mascellani]

Hi to the many recipients of this email.

I'm interested in having sagemath in Debian. I'm not a sagemath power
user and maybe should learn a bit of the many technologies used to build
it in order to maintain it, but I have no problems in learning what I
need (even if this can take time).

Tim, if you can explain a bit how you used to maintain sagemath, I could
get that as a starting point for the new package.

Thanks, Giovanni.
--
Giovanni Mascellani <masce...@poisson.phc.unipi.it>
Pisa, Italy

Web: http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~mascellani
Jabber: g.masc...@jabber.org / giov...@elabor.homelinux.org

[Harald Schilly]

On 4 Jul., 00:48, Giovanni Mascellani <g.mascell...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm interested in having sagemath in Debian.

Hi, I just want to tell you that it turned out to be a big problem
once we had a sagemath package in debian/ubuntu, because it was not
updated for two years. Many users were unsatisfied that all they were
able to do was 1+1 and everything else was more or less broken. I fear
this happens again if there are not at least a few people able to
maintain it.
On the other hand, it would be very useful to have a deb package that
wraps the official source distribution that we produce officially on
the website and submit it to PPA. It would make installation and
upgrading much easier if we provide it via PPA - https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/PPA
- since they would build the binaries (as far as I understand what
they do).
So, my 2cents: -1 to packaging for debian, +1 for PPA.

H

[William Stein]

I strongly agree with Harald. Moreover, Harald's suggestion is vastly
easier to implement.

>
> H
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--
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

[Tim Abbott]

Hello all,

I'm the maintainer of the sagemath package. Due to the package taking 8
months to get through NEW (resulting in it starting out 8 months out of
date) and my founding a startup around the time it entered NEW, I've never
had the time to update it across the original 8 months of backlog caused
by the NEW process.

I would support removing the package from Debian. An alternative that I
think would be better is to move it to Debian experimental (so that if I
find someone to work on incrementally updating it, we can do that without
having the package go through NEW a second time).

Having done some of the work on updating the current sagemath package to
sagemath 4+, I'm fairly confident that upstream hasn't changed the
structure of their build system and the old package will will save a lot
of time for future work on producing a package compliant with Debian
policy (e.g. it handles the issues involved in sagemath being distributed
as a tarball containing a large number of .tar.bz2 files, of which maybe
10 are original sagemath code and the rest are dependencies, and contains
all the code you need to make sagemath link against the system libraries).

That said, I don't foresee having the time myself, and have yet to find
anyone else who is serious about taking up this project. Upstream is, I
think rightly, currently more interested in getting setup their own apt
repository that distributes a working sagemath package that just bundles
all the dependencies (it's much easier to do, but would not be suitable
for inclusion in Debian).

Best regards,
-Tim Abbott

On Thu, 5 Aug 2010, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:

> retitle 573538 RM: sagemath -- RoQA; broken and outdated; RC-buggy
> reassign 573538 ftp.debian.org
> severity 573538 normal
> thanks
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm requesting the removal of the sagemath package. It is completely
> outdated in Debian, which makes everybody unhappy (upstream developers,
> users).
>
> It would still be nice to have this software in Debian, but coordinated
> efforts and discussions with the upstream community to resolve the open
> issues about dependencies on all other pieces of software are required
> first.
>
> The current Debian packaging can be found on
> http://snapshot.debian.org/package/sagemath/3.0.5dfsg-5.1/, even if I'm
> not too sure that it will be useful as a basis to package sagemath 4+.
>
> - Lucas
>
>
>