New maxima-sage in debian testing (forky)

[Thierry Dumont]

Today, maxima-sage was updated (or introduced ?) in Debian testing.

Will it solve the impossibility to compile sage with system maxima ?

(the actuel problem was th lisp interpreter)

t.

[Tobia...@gmx.de]

Maybe I'm missing something but it looks like it's still 5.45 as in the older Debian versions: https://packages.debian.org/forky/maxima-sage

[Michael Orlitzky]

Sage's version requirement for maxima is almost entirely based on
minor output differences in the doctests. Doctests compare results as
strings, so "2+2" and "4" are considered different, but Maxima often
gets smarter and the former becomes the latter in a new version.

If anyone wants to improve this, it would be really helpful to move as
many of these tests as possible to pytest; or at least, refactor them
to check bool(actual == expected) so that we look only for the result
of "True". We waste a lot of time updating our doctests for every
release, and then users waste a lot of time recompiling the brand-new
maxima that we have to require to pass the new tests.

Anyway, the good news is that if you don't care about 100% strcmp()
doctest compatibility, you can usually edit out the version bound and
the old version of maxima will work just fine.

[Dima Pasechnik]

On October 11, 2025 11:42:01 PM CDT, Thierry Dumont <tdu...@math.univ-lyon1.fr> wrote:
>Today, maxima-sage was updated (or introduced ?) in Debian testing.
>
>Will it solve the impossibility to compile sage with system maxima ?

Well, one has to try running ./configure and see whether the external maxima (the one that comes from this new dpkg) is accepted.