On Mar 6, 7:27 am, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > Kasper Peeters wrote: > > Has anyone considered emailing the official maintainer > > > Tim Abbott <tabb...@mit.edu> > > > and ask him whether he would be interested in handing over > > maintainership to someone with more time to bring the debian package > > up to date? > > > I would be happy to help out with this (including contacting Abbott), > > but it will clearly require quite a bit of work because neither Debian > > nor Ubuntu like packages which duplicate software already in the > > repositories. > > > Removing sage from Debian/Ubuntu is probably not a good idea, since > > those repositories are what those users expect to get their software > > from. Usage of my cadabra CAS went up dramatically once it got into > > the Ubuntu repositories, even though I had binaries available for > > download before that. So it would help a lot to have an up-to-date > > sage in those repositories too. > > > Cheers, > > Kasper > > One way the maintainers might accept the huge Sage bundle is if we could > produce > a big list of changes made to standard packages. Even libz has been patched > for > OS X. (There is a new beta which will stop that being necessary). > > The maintainers logic is clear they don't want to duplicate stuff. I can > appreciate that. I suggest we approach them, saying we understand this, and > that > in general it would be silly to include everything. If we then produce a long > list of packages which have needed to be patched, then it is less likely they > will object. > > There are several Solaris-specific patches. This could be used to our > advantage > by saying that Sage is multi-platform, and some patches are needed for > Solaris. > Maintaining two separate versions of the source code for two different > platforms > would present us severe difficulties. > > I suspect the Debian people are reasonable and could be persuaded to accept > things if there were aware of just how many patches have needed to be made to > 'standard' packages. > > One package I think we would have a lot of problem justifying is the inclusion > of 'Mercurial'. Whether Mercurial is a perquisite for Sage or not is > debatable, > but including its source code seems unnecessary to me. If someone is going to > be > submitting patches based on Mercurial, they are probably quite capable of > installing it themselves.
well, this is trickier than you think. E.g. Python 2.6 has not made it into Debian stable yet. And installing Python 2.6 on Debian stable using the standard Debian source package installation mechanisms does not work. Python is needed for functioning of many other system components on Debian, meaning that you just cannot just have a system-wide Python 2.6 on a Debian stable... Dmitrii > > I personally prefer to use a system wide install, as I can then apply patches > without having built Sage. -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
