Maxima told me to email this list when building sage 10.9 beta on Fedora 43.

[Georgi Guninski]

I am trying to build sage-devel (10.9-beta) downloaded from github on
Fedora 43 in a virtual machine.

The build failed when compiling Maxima, though I have system Maxima and ECL.

Maybe part of the problem is that I ran `make -j2` few times after the
installer told me there are problems with Maxima.

The logs are attached gzipp'ed:

[maxima-5.47.0] Error installing package maxima-5.47.0
[maxima-5.47.0]
************************************************************************
[maxima-5.47.0] Please email sage-devel
(http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel)
[maxima-5.47.0] explaining the problem and including the log files
[maxima-5.47.0] /opt/joro/sage-devel/sage/logs/pkgs/maxima-5.47.0.log
[maxima-5.47.0] and
[maxima-5.47.0] /opt/joro/sage-devel/sage/config.log
[maxima-5.47.0] Describe your computer, operating system, etc.
[maxima-5.47.0] If you want to try to fix the problem yourself,
*don't* just cd to
[maxima-5.47.0]
/opt/joro/sage-devel/sage/local/var/tmp/sage/build/maxima-5.47.0 and
type 'make' or whatever is appropriate.
[maxima-5.47.0] Instead, the following commands setup all environment variables
[maxima-5.47.0] correctly and load a subshell for you to debug the error:
[maxima-5.47.0] (cd
'/opt/joro/sage-devel/sage/local/var/tmp/sage/build/maxima-5.47.0' &&
'/opt/joro/sage-devel/sage/sage' --buildsh)

[Dima Pasechnik]

Fedora system package maxima cannot be used, as maxima needs to be compiled with ecl, with a loadable "maxima.fas" created, so that our Cython interface can talk to it

ecl system package cannot be used, as it is too old to be used with the gcc toolchain. While ecl has fixed this in their master, they haven't yet made a release with it.

So you must build them both.

[Nils Bruin]

Is it clear why in this case sage config didn't identify the system offerings for prerequisites to be insufficient? Or is this a problem with fedora where they ship an ECL that can't actually do what it's supposed to: generate valid C code for the compiler the system offers? In the latter case, I'd think that's a reportable bug to Fedora. It makes one wonder how Fedora built their ECL package in the first place then: ECL self-compiles to a large extent in its bootstrapping.

[Dima Pasechnik]

it is a Fedora bug all right, and they just pulled ecl in a recent release.

I was tempted to jump into Fedora development, to fix this, but, you know, I already have too much on my plate, and I am not even a Fedora user.

Dima

[Nils Bruin]

On Friday, 26 December 2025 at 12:33:25 UTC-8 dim...@gmail.com wrote:

it is a Fedora bug all right, and they just pulled ecl in a recent release.

It's an indirect bug. I think ECL was retired in FC 41 or FC 42 (I've just checked and I have ecl-23.9.9-3.fc40.x86_64 on my fc42 system). So the system was probably upgraded and fedora doesn't always remove retired packages upon upgrade. I guess it's an unsupported configuration to just have some random old packages still installed and Fedora's upgrade path seems to make it really easy to end up with such unsupported configurations. The fact that Fedora can't find someone willing to maintain their ECL package and that they therefore retire it is unfortunate but not really a bug in Fedora. In fact, it's not even a problem for building sage! Just the fact that there's a legacy ecl lying around that is no longer functioning properly that is causing the problem. I guess that's what "sudo remove-retired-packages" is for:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/upgrading-fedora-offline/#sect-clean-up-retired-packages