Some people within DebianScience would like to package again Sage for Debian. An old version of Sage got packaged long time ago by Tim Abbott, but, because of lack of maintainance, it became totally unusable and was removed from Debian.
Here is the current list of known or suspected issues:
- It has been reported that Sympy is only OK (for Sage) up to version 0.6.6. But v. 0.6.7 is in sid, so we expect some breakage there.
flint&flintqs: sage upstream would like to get rid of flintqs since some recent versions of flint ship with a quadratic sieve (see this ticket, but it hasn't been done yet. The following mail of William Hart tells more about the state of the quadratic sieve code in both flint and flint2
- opencdk / gnutls. William Stein thinks it is only needed to "provide a secure SSL mode for the Sage notebook". So we can probably use the Debian version of gnutls, but that will require assessment.
- Scipy. Sage does not yet support scipy 0.8 because it depends on numpy-1.4 and "Sage is not going there yet". Strangely, Debian sid currently has scipy 0.7.2 (good), but includes numpy 1.4.1 (ut-oh). So that will probably create issues.
Scipy in Sage is reported to require this patch: http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/changeset/5790
pexpect issue (Debian pkg: python-pexpect): Debian ships version 2.3, but Sage requires version 2.0 (though one of the necessary patches is already in 2.4). Plotting in the notebook is likely to break with newer versions that are in Debian; and >2.0 is reported to be slow.
ecl is OK unless compiled with Unicode support (http://github.com/cschwan/sage-on-gentoo/issues/closed#issue/2). Debian may do that, so it could be an issue.
- extcode: a miscellany. Appears to have Tim's debian subdirectory for building the package, jsMath, and tons of other stuff. Most (all?) of it is not a problem (jsMath is already in Debian, but which version is included in Sage is not clear to me), but some things may require finding upstream and building a Debian package. More work needed.
- Unpackaged dependencies:
- Dependencies that need to be updated:
libflint Bug#592349
libfplll0 Bug#592354
gfan Bug#592425
lcalc Bug#592426
m4ri Bug#592429
linbox doesn't compile with gcc 4.7 Bug#667264, and the current debian package is an rc, which doesn't have everything needed for sage (NonZeroRandIter in class LinBox::Modular<float>).
- zn_poly has version 0.8-1.1 in unstable, while sage uses 0.9.
Here are some recommendations for building Sage that may save time/thought:
- The Cephes Mathematical Library is only needed for systems where the libc doesn't provide appropriate mathematical functions (cygwin and FreeBSD) and so is not required for Debian.
eclib is Sage's packaging of mwrank. Neither eclib nor mwrank are in Debian, but JulienPuydt has packages up on mentors
The Package for Analyzing Lattice Polytopes (palp) isn't in debian, but JulienPuydt has packages up on mentors
- Data files. The following SPKG's are included in Sage, since they appear to be data files only we can probably just include them rather than building a package for each:
- rubiks is a toy spkg -- debian can probably get along without it.
The old, buggy sagemath Debian package source code is available via git: git://git.debian.org/git/debian-science/packages/sagemath.git and at http://snapshot.debian.org/package/sagemath/3.0.5dfsg-5.1/