Re: [sage-devel] Re: Debian package...
William Stein
> On 03/04/2010 11:14 AM, Burcin Erocal wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 4 Mar 2010 18:03:47 +0100
>> Florent Hivert<florent...@univ-rouen.fr> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi there,
>>>
>>> Disclaimer: I'm not a debian user and my intend is not to launch a
>>> flame nor to disregard the hard work that has been done to have a
>>> sage debian package.
>>>
>>> However, during sage days 20 as well as during my course at the
>>> university of Rouen, I've got at least a dozen reports of people
>>> trying to install sage with the standard "dpkg -i". Everything, looks
>>> fine except that this sage seems to be broken. Maxima simply does not
>>> start (just try x+1). I'm quite concerned that debian is a quite wide
>>> spread distro, and that for all these guys the image of sage is
>>> something huge that simply doesn't work. I was very angry when I
>>> heard this very argument from a colleague and two students. If
>>> confirmed, couldn't we make an official request to debian that this
>>> package is removed from their repositories. This non working sage is
>>> a very bad publicity...
>>
>> +10
>>
>> See also:
>>
>>
>> http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support/t/1f055a381532b667#3542567a19abd5ea
>>
>
> We might make a PPA for Ubuntu. If someone is interested in an easy way to
> install Sage via dpkg, that might be the best option at this point.
>
> I agree that removing sage 3.0.5 (or whatever version it is) from Debian is
> probably best, since our first piece of advice to anyone is to uninstall it
> and install Sage from scratch.
>
Yes, +1 to removing sage 3.0.5 from Debian.
But how do we make that happen?
-- William
Tim Abbott
> > We might make a PPA for Ubuntu. If someone is interested in an easy way to
> > install Sage via dpkg, that might be the best option at this point.
> >
> > I agree that removing sage 3.0.5 (or whatever version it is) from Debian is
> > probably best, since our first piece of advice to anyone is to uninstall it
> > and install Sage from scratch.
> >
>
> Yes, +1 to removing sage 3.0.5 from Debian.
>
> But how do we make that happen?
Sorry for the slow reply, I've been quite busy of late.
I suspect that your problem is actually that the Sage package migrated to
Ubuntu Karmic, which is a release lots of people use. Debian unstable has
essentially no users in comparison.
It's possible that moving the Debian package from unstable to experimental
would help (completely removing it from Debian will mean that if someone
decides to update the Debian Sage package, we'll need to go through the
year-long copyright review process again. That review process is what
killed the Debian sagemath package -- Upgrading during the review process
sends you to the back of the queue, and by a year after my original
submission, I had left MIT graduate school to start a startup, and I no
longer had the time to upgrade past a year of Sage development). But the
Debian unstable package is not important -- we should focus on the 50x
larger problem of Karmic.
As I mentioned on the bug report opened today at
<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=573538>, I'm talking to
a member of the Ubuntu stable release update team who I know to see what
the procedure would be for getting the package removed from Karmic.
I'll keep this thread updated as that progresses.
(Please note I am not directly subscribed to sage-devel, so you will need
to directly CC me or debian-sage@ if you want me to see your replies in
real time).
-Tim Abbott
Tim Abbott
> As I mentioned on the bug report opened today at
> <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=573538>, I'm talking to
> a member of the Ubuntu stable release update team who I know to see what
> the procedure would be for getting the package removed from Karmic.
The answer I got on this is that there is no procedure for removing a
package from a stable release -- Ubuntu doesn't do that kind of thing.
However, they did say that given the circumstances, it might be possible
to push through a major update to the package to Karmic when once one is
available.
So I think this leaves us at "we need to update the package". Sigh.
-Tim Abbott
Tim Abbott
> > However, they did say that given the circumstances, it might be possible
> > to push through a major update to the package to Karmic when once one is
> > available.
> >
> > So I think this leaves us at "we need to update the package". Sigh.
>
> Maybe we should just take whatever version of Sage is in Ubuntu right
> now and patch it so that running sage simply exits with something like
>
> **********************************************************************
> THIS VERSION OF SAGE IS RIDICULOUSLY OUT-OF-DATE!
>
> Please download a binary for the latest version of Sage at
>
> http://www.sagemath.org
>
> or build it yourself from source.
>
> If you insist on running this version, type
>
> ./sage -yes_i_know_its_ridiculous_but_i_want_to_anyway
> **********************************************************************
>
> What do you think? Too over-the-top?
I'd be very surprised if the Ubuntu archive team would accept that sort of
stable release update.
Think about it from their standpoint. They have thousands[1] of people
apparently using this package on Karmic, and so they're not going to be
enthused about intentionally breaking it for them all because the calculus
functionality doesn't work or upstream's newer version is much better.
(They would take e.g. a patch to fix the calculus functionality, though).
I don't like the current situation any more than you do, but the Ubuntu
archive maintainers' policy isn't unreasonable, even if it is frustrating.
[1] Where do I get the number thousands? The Ubuntu popularity contest
shows 1300 installations of sagemath on Ubuntu, and generally only a small
fraction of Ubuntu systems participate in popcon.
-Tim Abbott
William Stein
<not really serious!>
Maybe I could threaten them with a trademark lawsuit? So at least
they would have to call it some funny name (like Basil) instead of
"Sage". Anyway, this situation is given me a newfound appreciation
for why Firefox isn't called "Firefox" in some Linux distros...
</not really serious!>
>
> [1] Where do I get the number thousands? The Ubuntu popularity contest
> shows 1300 installations of sagemath on Ubuntu, and generally only a small
> fraction of Ubuntu systems participate in popcon.
>
> -Tim Abbott
>
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>
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org