Dear list
Due to various reasons I haven't been able to keep up to date with the development of Sage. However, I still use Sage in my research and mainly various of my co-authors use Sage. Our workflow often consists of me writing some external programs (usually in C) and additional several Python scripts which interface with these programs. When the program and scripts are mature enough, some of these are released as supplementary material for some papers, but usually they are too niche to be included in Sage. The way this needs to be handled has changed several times through the years, and I wanted to inform myself as to what the best way to handle this would be.
It used to be that my co-authors could simply install such a package with the command:
sage -f my-package.spkg
This changed about five years ago, and since then my instructions to them read roughly as
* copy the folder mypackage (containing ) into SAGE_ROOT/build/pkgs
* copy the file mypackage.tar.gz (containing the source code) into SAGE_ROOT/upstream.
* run the command: $ sage --package fix-checksum mypackage
* run the command: $ sage -i mypackage
The third step changed at version 7.3 (it used to be $ sage -sh sage-fix-pkg-checksums)
Nowadays, it seems that this has changed again, because I get reports that installing the package this way hangs indefinitely.
I mainly have two questions:
* Is there another way to handle this, or am I doing the right thing and do I just need to keep the instructions up to date.
* Is there a clear place where this is documented? As I said I haven't been able to keep up with Sage development recently, so each time I had to dive into the documentation and puzzle the instructions for these kinds of external packages together from different places in the documentation. There is the repository https://github.com/sagemath/sage_sample which gives a sample of how to create a package for Sage, however this is about packaging Python code and not about binaries that need to be compiled and made available to Sage.
Kind regards
Nico