Hello, Andreas Enge <[email protected]> writes:
> the attached patch adds the computer algebra system for group theory GAP. > I am only interested in it as an input to SAGE, but it appears that someone > on IRC was also trying to package it yesterday, so it would be nice if you > could check whether this package meets your needs. I was also trying to pave the way towards SAGE. I tested it briefly and, AFAIC, it looks good. Thank you for the work. > There is an impressive number of optional GAP packages that are shipped with > the tarball; for the time being, I included only some of them in the > installation. GAP packages require their own input, so they could be considered as first-class packages in Guix (e.g, define-public gap-sonata), all propagating gap and setting an appropriate GAP root directory. OTOH, GAP provides its own mechanism to handle its packages. > The documentation poses problems: It is included in the tarball, but I thought > it would be in style to recreate it from source. Adding texlive-minimal is > not sufficient and creates blank pdf pages (since fonts are missing; I think > we need to revisit texlive-minimal and make it a little less minimal). Adding > texlive helps, but now it also ends up in the closure, which is excessive! > I am wondering whether we could simply drop texlive and delete the bundled > pdf documentation; the on-line documentation should then still be available. > What do you think? > > Also, I tried to create a separate doc package, but then installing both > gap and gap:doc into a user profile is not enough: Documentation is searched > for relatively to the binary, I think. (To check this, I called > "?LoadPackage" from inside a gap session, which does not work with a separate > doc package.) Personally, I would be happy with having one package only if we > delete the pdf documentation: There are then about 35MB of > documentation. Considering the educational purpose of GAP, and the sheer size of the packages involved, I tend to think that 35MB documentation is not much of a problem. IMO, we should keep it around. Of course, a gap:doc ouput seems the best option, provided it can be made to work. For example, could gap:doc install "doc" directory in a new location and symlink "lib", "bin", etc. from the original "out" directory? Then the only thing left to do would be to set GAP_DIR (e.g, by modifying gap.sh) to "doc" output. Regards, -- Nicolas Goaziou 0x80A93738
