Hi all, It occurred to me a few months ago, that the sage-on-gentoo overlay was also the place to get a recent `gap`. The version in the main tree is 4.4.12 and in the sage-on-gentoo overlay we have some 4.7.x and 4.8.x. However while functional and sufficient to work with sage, gap from the overlay stinks. And then there is the issue of gap packages.
Unlike R, gap doesn’t have a nice package installer and you cannot just drop them in a user space (that I know off). Also package’s documentation is messy and expected inside the package. The format seems to be html, new style doc, or tex, old style doc. So often we have both in separate folder. I also discovered there is something called `gac` to precompile packages that hasn’t been exposed by the current ebuild. And a good thing too since it is fairly broken. But looking at it explains a lot about the requirement of keeping gap’s object files around I was told about. So later today I will merge a new gap branch which will include a clean up of files that we don’t want. Expose gac, offer an archive instead of object files for gac to use, and a first batch of gap packages in a new dev-gap category. Anyone wanting to know why I want a new category, there are a lots of packages at http://www.gap-system.org/Packages/packages.html and a new category will eft any possible ambiguity. I am concentrating on packages standardly used in sage but I’ll take request and certainly PR for new packages. If there are any gap users or specialists I’ll take your opinions seriously. Cheers, François
