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 pages (master branch, develop branch) give an overview about package versions in Sage and Debian. If you want to help out, pick one of the open tasks or issues below and get going. Or contact us via the mailing list or in #debian-science on irc.oftc.net.

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

New build system for Sage (the distribution)

this is slightly out of date, also, Sage (the community) is not interested in using packages that another distribution provides.

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. The transition of this work into Sage is coordinated via a bunch of Sage tickets. 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

New build system for Sage (the library)

There is some work in progress trying to make sagelib work on top of any software distribution. we use autotools to sort out dependencies, run time paths and provide standard build/installation routines. unlike the first approach, this is heading towards a fork and will likely not play well with the current upstream development process. Experimental tarballs are available at http://tool.em.cs.uni-frankfurt.de/~felix/sagelib/, there is no public git repo yet.

Open tasks

Package

Bug / Link

Assigned

Comments

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

jmol

There is a request for help, see 719330

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. There is a new upstream version so Sage might update, see this sage bug.

singular

PTS

singular 3.1.6 is packaged in debian-science's git and Sage >= 6.2 has also 3.1.6; an ITP has been filled to package singular 4.0.1, see 764475.

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

rubiks

a toy spkg -- low priority

sagenb

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

sagetex

Softwares that need to be packaged:

4ti2

Singular 4 depends on 4ti2; an ITP has been filled to package 4ti2 1.6.2, see 769997;

normaliz

Singular 4 depends on normaliz; an ITP has been filled to package normaliz 2.12.2, see 776019;

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.

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.

Other known or suspected issues

Information bits that are no issues

Old sagemath package

The old, buggy sagemath Debian package source code is available via git (sagemath) and at http://snapshot.debian.org/package/sagemath/3.0.5dfsg-5.1/