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. The status page gives an overview about package versions in Sage and Debian.

Steps to get an up-to-date Sage standard suite in Debian

New build system for Sage the library

The Sage library is getting an autotools build system in the course of a Google Summer of Code project. With the new build system, it can be built against system libraries. There are tarballs with the code at http://tool.em.cs.uni-frankfurt.de/~felix/sage/. (There is also a git repository but the tarballs are recommended). Note that this is work in progress and problems are expected, but we are happy about testers. We have a Debian package sagelib that currently builds metapackages that help installing the build dependencies of Sage. To test building Sage against Debian packages, one should consult the control file. The dependencies of the metapackage sagelib-builddeps-git still need special treatment and can't be just installed from Debian.

The following Debian packages should be installed from the git repositories:

For the remaining packages where the Debian package is missing or is missing features required by Sage, it is currently most convenient to use the versions from Sage. This is done by configuring with

../configure \
--disable-all \
--enable-{boehm_gc,cython,ecl,flintqs,genus2reduction,maxima,pari,pexpect,pynac,rubiks,sagelib,sagetex,tachyon} \
--with-gmp

Open tasks

Many of the packages that are already in Debian were created by Tim Abbott. He is fine with us taking over maintainership of these packages (see mail quoted here). All packages where he is still listed as the maintainer need a new maintainer.

Package

Bug / Link

Assigned

Comments

Packages that need a new maintainer and an upload to Debian:

flint

592349

pexpect 2.0

(Debian pkg: python-pexpect): Debian ships version 2.4, 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. see this sage bug

polybori

There was an upload to experimental recently, but the package was since abandoned.

singular

singular 3.1.6 is packaged in debian-science's git but sage still relies on 3.1.5 -- and of course they're not compatible... see this sage bug

Sage components that need a new maintainer and an upload to Debian:

rubiks

a toy spkg -- low priority

sage

sagenb

the dependencies should be in Debian now (691509, 703541, 703531, 703533, 703534, 703535 and 703536)

sagetex

Other Debian packages that need a new maintainer:

gap-guava

Does not appear on the status page, because it is part of the gap package in Sage. Is this strictly required for Sage?

symmetrica

sympow

tachyon

Someone is working on it:

flintqs

Dominique

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). This mail of William Hart tells more about the state of the quadratic sieve code in both flint and flint2.

jmol

There is a request for help, see 719330

Packages that are (hopefully) not needed:

cephes

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.

genus2reduction

The Debian package is broken, see 709073 . The program is included in pari >= 2.6, so the Sage package will hopefully disappear in the future.

iconv

is part of the libc

libgap

Will most likely be replaced by a wrapper for GAP.

mpir

708391

mpir is supposed to be ABI-compatible with gmp. A lot of math packages use gmp and we hope we can have a purely gmp based Sage in Debian. Combining the two will most likely lead to conflicts, using mpir we would need an extra mpir version of many packages.

termcap

extcode

perhaps not needed: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!topic/sage-devel/DfUqdFG90bo

sage_root

sage_scripts

Other known or suspected issues

Old sagemath package

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/