[Debian-science-sagemath] Status of sagemath?

[E. Madison Bray]

On Sun, Dec 16, 2018 at 8:23 PM Jerome BENOIT <calculus at rezozer.net> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On 16/12/2018 22:32, Ximin Luo wrote:
> > Hi, I haven't looked at the sagemath Debian package in a while. It seems to be in a quite bad condition with some critical bugs relating to linking with gap and singular.
> >
> > Could someone please summarise what needs to be done? I am happy to do some stuff over the holidays, before the next testing freeze.
> >
> > X
>
> Concerning GAP, we have to wait gap 10 , which is already in experimental. Note that gap 10 furnishes
> the so expected library, that is libgap-sage is no more needed.
> Concerning singular, sagemath must be built against the version already in testing.

Regarding the status of porting Sage to use GAP 4.10, I have been
working on that, so here is a brief status update:  The port is almost
ready from the Sage end of things, but it still required a number of
patches to GAP.  I am working with the GAP developers to hopefully
release a GAP 4.10.1 containing those patches, hopefully as soon as
this week.  If/when that gets done, GAP 4.10.1 should be considered
the first release with a truly "usable" libgap API, as what was
available in 4.10.0 was not really ready for non-trivial use.

If for some reason that release can't be made in time for Debian, the
necessary patches can still applied to the Debian package for GAP if
necessary.  I'm not sure exactly what the policy is on that, but these
are not Sage-specific patches or anything like that, but rather they
fix real bugs and shortcomings that made the libgap API not very
usable.

On the Sage end of things, Sage 8.5 will be released very soon, and
will *not* contain support for GAP 4.10.  I will push Volker to try to
release a Sage 8.6 soon focused just on the GAP stuff; otherwise it
will have to be applied to Sage 8.5 as a patch which I find
unfortunate.  I'm going to see if I can push the Sage 8.5 release back
but knowing Volker that might be impossible.... :(