SageMath 8.4 released

[Samuel Lelièvre]

News from SageMath, the Sage Mathematics Software System!

SageMath 8.4 was released on 2018-10-17.

SageMath, also known as Sage (website: http://sagemath.org/), is
developed mostly by volunteers, although in recent years funding
efforts in various countries has allowed to pay Sage developers
to work full time on Sage and its ecosystem.

Sage combines over 100 free software packages, and includes over
a million lines of new code in Python and Cython.

SageMath can be tried or used online via SageCell and CoCalc:

* SageCell: http://sagecell.sagemath.org/
* CoCalc: https://cocalc.com

To install SageMath on a computer, compiled versions for most
operating systems, including native installers for most Linux
distributions, for macOS, for Windows, as well as source files
if you wish to compile Sage yourself, are available from:

* http://www.sagemath.org/download.html

(We send the announcement a few days after the release so that
most versions will have made their way to the download mirrors.)

SageMath is also available as a Docker image, and is packaged for
Arch Linux, Conda, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Homebrew, Nix, ...
The version available for your favourite package manager might
be listed at: https://repology.org/metapackage/sagemath/versions

A bootable USB called SageDebianLive, and a virtual machine
appliance called SageAppliance, are also available.

Separate announcements will follow to announce udpates of
SageDebianLive and Sage-Windows for SageMath 8.4, as they require
extra work to prepare after the release for other platforms.

For more detail on the various ways Sage is distributed, see:

* https://wiki.sagemath.org/Distribution

For installation instructions, see

* http://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation/index.html

The SageMath plugin for TeXmacs was very recently updated, and
will let you use Sage from within TeXmacs.

* https://github.com/texmacs/SageMath.tm

The `sage-shell-mode` for Emacs lets you use Sage from Emacs:

* https://github.com/sagemath/sage-shell-mode

Please ask any questions and/or report any problems to Ask Sage,
our questions and answers forum, or to the sage-support mailing list.

* Ask Sage: https://ask.sagemath.org/
* sage-support: https://groups.google.com/group/sage-support

You can also drop by the #sagemath IRC channel on freenode.

Details about tickets closed and contributors for each release:

* http://www.sagemath.org/changelogs/

Release manager for this release: Volker Braun.

If you want to follow SageMath's development more closely,
development releases are available from the "download-latest" page;
they are announced and discussed on the sage-release mailing list;
for development discussion, check out the sage-devel mailing list.

* download-latest: https://www.sagemath.org/download-latest.html
* sage-release: https://groups.google.com/group/sage-release
* sage-devel: https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel