Error when building sage 10.9.beta8

[Simon King]

Hi!

I try to build sagelib-10.9.beta8, which fails as follows (I hope I'm giving the relevant information here):

...

[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   The Meson build system
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Version: 1.8.3
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Source dir: /home/king/sagemath/sage
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Build dir: /home/king/sagemath/sage/build/sage-distro
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Build type: native build
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Project name: SageMath
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Project version: 10.9.beta8
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   C compiler for the host machine: gcc (gcc 13.3.0 "gcc (Ubuntu 13.3.0-6ubuntu2~24.04.1) 13.3.0")
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   C linker for the host machine: gcc ld.bfd 2.42
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   C++ compiler for the host machine: g++ -std=gnu++11 (gcc 13.3.0 "g++ (Ubuntu 13.3.0-6ubuntu2~24.04.1) 13.3.0")
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   C++ linker for the host machine: g++ -std=gnu++11 ld.bfd 2.42
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Cython compiler for the host machine: cython (cython 3.2.4)
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Host machine cpu family: x86_64
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Host machine cpu: x86_64
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Program python found: YES (/home/king/sagemath/sage/local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/bin/python3)
...

[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Configuring config.py using configuration
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   ../../src/sage/meson.build:178: WARNING: The variable(s) 'FOURTITWO_CIRCUITS', 'FOURTITWO_GRAVER', 'FOURTITWO_GROEBNER', 'FOURTITWO_HILBERT', 'FOURTITWO_MARKOV', 'FOURTITWO_PPI', 'FOURTITWO_QSOLVE', 'FOURTITWO_RAYS', 'FOURTITWO_ZSOLVE', 'SAGE_MATHJAX_DIR' in the input file 'src/sage/config.py.in' are not present in the given configuration data.
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   ../../src/doc/meson.build:5: WARNING: Documentation building enabled, generating targets may be slow. To disable this, pass -Dbuild-docs=false.
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   Program python (sphinx) found: YES (/home/king/sagemath/sage/local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/bin/python3) modules: sphinx
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   ../../meson.build:225:3: ERROR: File conftest.py does not exist.
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   A full log can be found at /home/king/sagemath/sage/build/sage-distro/meson-logs/meson-log.txt

How can I fix that? Note that I'm building in a virtual environment, because without that I keep getting an error at "import cmake".

Best regards
Simon

[Antonio Rojas]

El jueves, 26 de marzo de 2026 a las 9:33:42 UTC+1, Simon King escribió:

Hi!

I try to build sagelib-10.9.beta8, which fails as follows (I hope I'm giving the relevant information here):

..

[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   ../../meson.build:225:3: ERROR: File conftest.py does not exist.
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]
[sagelib-10.9.beta8] [spkg-install]   A full log can be found at /home/king/sagemath/sage/build/sage-distro/meson-logs/meson-log.txt

Does that file exist in your source tree? If not, how did you download the source? 

[Simon King]

Hi Antonio,

$ find . -name conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/zmq/tests/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/networkx/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/nbclient/tests/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/sympy/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/nbconvert/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/numpy/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/jupyterlab/tests/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/mpl_toolkits/axes_grid1/tests/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/mpl_toolkits/mplot3d/tests/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/mpl_toolkits/axisartist/tests/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/jupyter_lsp/tests/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/matplotlib/testing/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/matplotlib/tests/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/IPython/conftest.py
./local/var/lib/sage/venv-python3.12.5/lib/python3.12/site-packages/scipy/conftest.py

So, there are a couple of conftest.py-files.

I guess I got the sources from github. Before trying to build, I did "git pull".

Best regards
Simon

[Dima Pasechnik]

what is the output of

   git status

?

There is a toplevel contest.py which is deleted while running ./configure and then restored, so perhaps this restore magic failed for you.

You can manually restore it using git

[Simon King]

Hi Dima,

indeed, git status says that confest.py was deleted. After `git restore conftest.py`, `make` resulted in meson running for quite a long time, I interrupted after 10 minutes. After `make distclean`, `make` just resulted in the same error: conftest.py vanished.

I'm restoring conftest.py again and will be more patient this time.

Simon

[Simon King]

Hi Dima,

NOT making distclean and instead being patient with meson running for a long time without any evidence of progress eventually did the trick.

Thank you
Simon

[Dima Pasechnik]

the bottleneck in running meson (to build sagelib) is currently related to building documentation

--disable-doc is a ./configure option to speed it up.