Re: [sage-release] Re: sage-4.2.1

[William Stein]

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Minh Nguyen <nguye...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
> On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 5:35 AM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Mike Hansen and I have finished sage-4.2.1:
>>
>>   http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wstein/farm/src/sage-4.2.1.tar
>
> If the next release is a major features release, e.g. Sage 4.3, then

Yes Sage-4.3 will be the next release, and I hope it has some major
features (e.g., lots of the combinatorics codebase gets merged back
into mainline sage).

> I'll start work on doing a maintenance release for Sage 4.2.x up until
> April 2010. Incidentally, my proposal to do a maintenance release for
> up to 6 months coincide with the release schedule of Ubuntu, and I
> personally think that's a good way to do it.

What does this mean? Are you going to make binaries and source tarballs
that contain only bug fixes, and make it so people can "sage -upgrade"
to get them? I'm curious.


> Thinking about this task of doing maintenance releases a bit more,
> perhaps it's a good idea to do the same thing for the Debian port of
> Sage. I have thought about volunteering my time to work on both the
> maintenance releases as well as on updating the Debian port. But while
> I have some experience with release management within the Sage
> project, I have absolutely no experience at all with maintaining Sage
> or any other project for Debian or Ubuntu. I think that if one is to
> become a maintainer of a Debian package, then one needs to have the
> endorsement of an existing Debian maintainer. In the past, Tim Abbott
> has expressed an interest in helping anyone who would like to help
> maintain the Debian port of Sage. But I'm not sure how much time he
> has to devote to this, considering that I'm a complete newbie with
> respect to maintaining Debian packages.

Please, please, whoever does this, I implore you to first cut your
teeth by making a monolithic unofficial Sage deb that installs into
/opt (say)! This is a a billion times easier than doing what Tim
Abbott did, and yet will be incredibly useful to a lot of people at
the same time. And it definitely does add significant value over the
Sage tarballs we currently distribute, since the Debian build and
dependency system is quite sophisticated.

>
>
>> Release notes, binaries, the above being posted online, etc., will
>> follow in due course.
>
> I think I can resume the task of writing release tours, at least for
> Sage 4.2.1. I'll start on it today.

Thanks!

William

[Tim Abbott]

On Sun, 15 Nov 2009, Minh Nguyen wrote:

> > Please, please, whoever does this, I implore you to first cut your
> > teeth by making a monolithic unofficial Sage deb that installs into
> > /opt (say)! This is a a billion times easier than doing what Tim
> > Abbott did, and yet will be incredibly useful to a lot of people at
> > the same time. And it definitely does add significant value over the
> > Sage tarballs we currently distribute, since the Debian build and
> > dependency system is quite sophisticated.
>

> I see. Thanking for this suggestion.

If you're going to go this route, I recommend actually starting from the
package I've made which installs the Sage installation into
/usr/lib/sagemath; it'll save you a lot of trouble trying to hook the Sage
build system with the Debian build system.

Currently, the way things work with it is that one selects which spkgs to
build and for which ones you're going to use the system libraries. So you
can start with taking almost all the dependencies from the Sage tarball,
and then once you have that working satisfactorily, one can start
switching dependencies over to using the dependencies from Debian. Once
you get to using (essentially) only dependencies from Debian, we'll have a
package that we can upload to Debian. It's actually the case that the
Debian package contains the spkg copy of cython because the version in
Debian at the time was too old.

-Tim Abbott