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, develop) 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.

Building Sage with Debian packages

We have a git repository (sagemath) to document the steps we currently do to experiment with building Sage against Debian packages. Important elements are the build dependencies of Sage, patches for Sage and a script called "pruner" that uses automake to determine if the necessary packages are installed (see also this mail).

Start with Debian unstable (sid) with experimental sources enabled. It is nice to do this in a chroot with schroot. (If your build fails with "Permission denied", try adding the following line to /etc/schroot/default/fstab: tmpfs  /dev/shm  tmpfs  rw,nosuid,nodev  0  0 - more details here)

To set up your system for working with our repo:

sudo apt-get install git quilt devscripts python-sphinx

Install packages that are required before installing the build dependencies.

for d in deb deb-src; do \
    echo "$d https://debian-science.alioth.debian.org/apt sid-sage/"; done \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/deb-sci-sage.list

Add our unstable-sage repo for patched dependencies. This is optional; if you prefer you can build these yourself from the instructions in the table below.

gpg --recv-keys 0xD1188AF4A1398A5FCC3F576654B3F967097676A0

Get the repo key.

gpg --export 0xD1188AF4A1398A5FCC3F576654B3F967097676A0 | sudo apt-key add -

Install the repo key.

printf "Package: *\nPin: release n=sid-sage\nPin-Priority: 100\n" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/deb-sci-sage
sudo apt-get update

Pin our repo at a low priority so it doesn't mess with the rest of your system. OTOH, if you really really want this repo's packages, to make sure you get the latest and greatest efforts of the Debian Sage packaging team above all else (including maybe our patched dependency packages messing up your system) then you can set the Pin-Priority to a high number like 800.

git clone --recursive https://anonscm.debian.org/git/debian-science/packages/sagemath.git

Recursive git clone to also get sage which is included as a git submodule.

To build the package, run:

debian/rules reset

Apply patches and force-reset the upstream sage submodule. Note: also removes ~/.sage/local and ~/.local/share/sagemath

debian/rules build-dep

Install build dependencies. (Run 'apt-get -f install' afterwards.)

debian/rules prune

Run the pruner script. Check that the output matches the one below.

debian/rules build

Build sage and run the test suite.

The output of the pruner tells you in the end which dependencies were not found on the machine. These will be downloaded and built in the build step, before Sage itself is built. Currently (November 2016) the pruner should output something like the following.

ipywidgets will not come from debian!
159 system packages will be used

See debian/README.Debian for any workarounds you might have to apply, such as patching local system files.

Open tasks

Packages in our development APT repository:

Up-to-date information about the packages in the repo can be found on the status pages. (master branch, develop branch)

Package

Bug / Link

Reason for being in the repository

Not uploaded yet:

sagenb

The current sagenb package ships a bunch of javascript libraries. It should use at least these Debian packages instead: mathjax, tinymce, jquery, jqueryui, codemirror

Patched packages:

numpy

842348

Debian maintainer needs to apply this proposed upstream patch - basically accepted but needs unit tests

gap

844789

This patch causes doctests failures related to GAP (and libGAP): this is an unpatched version of the GAP package 4r8p6-1.

sympy

840621

We applied this patch to fix a doctest.

In NEW queue (after it passes, we can drop it from our APT repo):

d3-format

844784

Build-Depends of widgetsnbextension.

jquery-typeahead.js

840535

Build-Depends of jupyter-notebook.

jupyter-sphinx-theme

838798

Build-Depends of ipywidgets.

jupyter-notebook

801366

Build-Depends of sagemath.

maxima-sage

779804

This is a special Maxima package using ECL and the same version as what Sage 7.4 uses; see bug report for more details.

nbsphinx

838806

Build-Depends of jupyter-sphinx-theme.

sagenb_export

839782

Build-Depends of sagemath.

Other packages:

Package

Bug / Link

Comments

Need to be packaged:

ipywidgets

838684, 838683

https://github.com/ipython/ipywidgets, includes widgetsnbextension

RC bugs that need to be fixed before the freeze (prevent testing migration):

cython

845696

libatomic-ops

728955

This prevents ecl from migrating to testing. This 3 year old bug is also in testing, so the package should migrate when the missing packages are removed from testing.

linbox

797167, 840458

ppl

806865, 811825

A package fixing the bugs is in NEW queue.

pyzmq

818265

Things that can wait until after stretch:

cvxopt

An update is ready in git, ?SageMath seems to work with the old version.

jmol

There is a request for help, see 719330

thebe

https://github.com/oreillymedia/thebe, lots of javascript dependencies

Uploading patched packages

We've set up a mini-dinstall APT repo to upload our patched Debian packages to, so that we can build sage against these. This is a temporary measure to make everything work more quickly, and these patched packages are unlikely to be added to Debian officially.

To upload, you must be a member of the debian-science group on alioth. Then, you should add this to your ~/.dput.cf:

[deb-sci-sage]
method = scp
fqdn = alioth.debian.org
incoming = /home/groups/debian-science/htdocs/apt/mini-dinstall/incoming/
post_upload_command = ssh alioth.debian.org /home/groups/debian-science/mini-dinstall

mini-dinstall is pretty forgiving and you should be able to overwrite any existing version in this repo or even downgrade versions. However, you must set the distribution in debian/changelog to sid-sage or unstable-sage, otherwise your package will get rejected. Alternatively, do the build without changing debian/changelog, then afterwards edit the .changes file to say Distribution: sid-sage, then debsign it and upload.

Please include the .orig tarball in your upload, which helps our status pages report more accurately. To do this, you can give --changes-option=-sa to dpkg-buildpackage, or if you forget to do this then you can run changestool $XXX.changes includeallsources after the build, then debsign it and upload.

To remove a package:

Links