Re: SAGE packages for Debian (fwd)

[Timothy G Abbott]

On Wed, 7 May 2008, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:


On 06/05/2008, Kapil Hari Paranjape <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

 For example, SAGE wanted a particular version of "gpari" with some
 patches. The actual version of "gpari" in Debian is different.


It's a bit worse than that. I asked William Stein about it a while ago
when I had wild dreams of embarking on the Sage packaging myself.

Sage patches pretty much all of the packages it ships. It patches
Maxima, for example, which apparently breaks everything with each new
release and Will Stein doesnt' like, and it also patches Octave. It
seems to me to be a bit worse than the problems that people faced when
packaging OO.o, which also shipped with its own Java implementation.


In SAGE 3.0.1, the Maxima spkg is stock 5.13.0 (except they seem to have 
removed some of the documentation to save disk space).


-Tim Abbott

Re: SAGE packages for Debian (fwd)

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 06/05/2008, Kapil Hari Paranjape <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  For example, SAGE wanted a particular version of "gpari" with some
>  patches. The actual version of "gpari" in Debian is different.

It's a bit worse than that. I asked William Stein about it a while ago
when I had wild dreams of embarking on the Sage packaging myself.

Sage patches pretty much all of the packages it ships. It patches
Maxima, for example, which apparently breaks everything with each new
release and Will Stein doesnt' like, and it also patches Octave. It
seems to me to be a bit worse than the problems that people faced when
packaging OO.o, which also shipped with its own Java implementation.

I applaud this effort to package Sage. I'll consider looking at the
packaging and see if I can contribute anything. We do need packagings
of Singular, and probably should begin by packaging surf too, which
looks like a simpler task.

- Jordi G. H.


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: SAGE packages for Debian (fwd)

[Timothy G Abbott]

On Wed, 7 May 2008, Kapil Hari Paranjape wrote:


The primary problem that makes my packages
potentially unsuitable for uploading to Debian now is many of them may
violate Debian library policy:


Last time I looked at the problem of packaging SAGE, there was one
other issue.

SAGE required certain libraries/programs to be "fixed" at certain
upstream versions (with/without additional patches) in order to
ensure compatible behaviour.

For example, SAGE wanted a particular version of "gpari" with some
patches. The actual version of "gpari" in Debian is different.

If this has changed, then please correct me. Otherwise, it raises a
host of issues which would cause the package(s) to be incompatible with
Debian.


The SAGE folks ship a bundle with all their dependencies that they've 
tested completely, because it allows them to fix any bug in SAGE, 
regardless of whether the problem is in SAGE itself or one of their 
dependencies, and helps them limit the amount of time they spend debugging 
problems the developers can't reproduce.  So, they definitely tell anyone 
who asks about running SAGE with their own "gpari" that it's not a 
supported configuration.


In my experience running with whatever version of these packages is in 
Debian Lenny, the SAGE code doesn't rely heavily on a particular version 
of a dependency.  They do often include the latest versions of their 
dependencies, however, and the SAGE code sometimes starts using new 
features in these dependencies fairly quickly.  So, for example, my 
repository has at various points in time contained updated versions of 
cython, zodb, and matplotlib asking for them to update to a new version 
because SAGE used interfaces new in a later release than that available in 
Debian.  Cython should perhaps be considered an exception here because its 
development is tied to that of SAGE.  So, I've needed newer versions of 2 
of the 50 packages already in Debian that SAGE depends on.


SAGE also does maintain patches against upstream packages, though they 
have been working hard during 2008 to get their patches merged upstream (I 
think in part inspired by the fact that this needs to happen for SAGE to 
be packaged as anything other than a giant blob).  Most of these patches 
go away with the next upstream release; it's not the end of the world if 
the package for SAGE in Debian keeps using that buggy gpari (or whatever) 
package until upstream merges the fix.  My packages at present only apply 
a few patches against the upstream sources (though I obtain my upstream 
sources from SAGE's upstream portion of their spkgs; in most cases these 
are in fact clean upstream but I think a few are pre-release versions of 
the upstream because the upstream developer is working on SAGE).


So, while I think that version issues was a big problem 6 months ago, I 
don't think it's a big problem now.



This aspect of SAGE seemed to make it more appropriate for a Custom
Debian Distribution rather than a package. It may be easier to start
this way in any case given the complexity. Over time, after
co-ordinating with the developers of SAGE dependencies within Debian
it should be possible to fold all the packages back into Debian. (Ref:
demudi and texlive)


I'm not familiar with how CDDs work.  Reading the description at 
, I'm not certain what running a CDD 
actually entails (the website talks about a lot of issues involved, but 
not about things like what apt repository CDD packages live in, how users 
install them, etc. -- maybe this depends on the CDD?).


-Tim Abbott


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: SAGE packages for Debian (fwd)

[Kapil Hari Paranjape]

Hello,

On Tue, 06 May 2008, Timothy G Abbott wrote:
> I've been working on packaging for Debian SAGE (http://sagemath.org), a  
> large free mathematics software conglomeration that is competing with  
> proprietary mathematical software systems such as Mathematica, Matlab,  
> Maple, and Magma (Debian bug #455292).

Thanks for your work on SAGE. We do need to make SAGE available more
widely.

> The primary problem that makes my packages 
> potentially unsuitable for uploading to Debian now is many of them may 
> violate Debian library policy:

Last time I looked at the problem of packaging SAGE, there was one
other issue.

SAGE required certain libraries/programs to be "fixed" at certain
upstream versions (with/without additional patches) in order to
ensure compatible behaviour.

For example, SAGE wanted a particular version of "gpari" with some
patches. The actual version of "gpari" in Debian is different.

If this has changed, then please correct me. Otherwise, it raises a
host of issues which would cause the package(s) to be incompatible with
Debian.

This aspect of SAGE seemed to make it more appropriate for a Custom
Debian Distribution rather than a package. It may be easier to start
this way in any case given the complexity. Over time, after
co-ordinating with the developers of SAGE dependencies within Debian
it should be possible to fold all the packages back into Debian. (Ref:
demudi and texlive)

Regards,

Kapil.
--


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]