SageMath 8.6 released

[Samuel Lelièvre]

News from SageMath, the Sage Mathematics Software System!

SageMath 8.6 was released on 2019-01-15.

SageMath, also known as Sage (website: http://sagemath.org/), is
developed mostly by volunteers, although in recent years several
developers have been paid to work full time or part time on Sage.

Sage combines over 150 free software packages, and includes over
a million lines of new Python code.

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

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

Both have been updated to SageMath 8.6.

To install SageMath on a computer, one can use compiled versions
for most operating systems, including native installers for most
Linux distributions, for macOS, for Windows. Source files are also
available in order to compile Sage from source. For all downloads:

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

This announcement is sent 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.

Sage-Windows and Sage Debian Live take some extra work after the
release of a new version of the sources; they are not yet updated
to 8.6, a separate announcement will be sent out when they are.

To get notified of the new releases of Sage-Windows, you can now
open a GitHub account and subscribe to the release announcements
for Sage-Windows (by clicking "Watch" then "Releases only") at

* https://github.com/sagemath/sage-windows/releases

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

The SageMath plugin for TeXmacs was recently updated,
and will let you use Sage from within TeXmacs (which
can also be used inside CoCalc since recently).

* 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,
indicating your operating system, the version of Sage and the way it
was installed, and any code that can help reproduce your problem.

* 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
and the Sage Trac server.

* 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
* Sage Trac: https://trac.sagemath.org/

[Samuel Lelièvre]

Sage-Windows has been updated to SageMath 8.6.

It can be downloaded from the usual locations:

- https://github.com/sagemath/sage-windows/releases
- http://www.sagemath.org/download-windows.html