[Debian-science-sagemath] Sage 8.4 and Debian buster

[Tobias Hansen]

Hi,

I started packaging sagemath 8.4 in the experimental branch of the git repo and it builds now, although not all required packages are in experimental yet:

- libbraiding and libhomfly are in NEW.
- I'll upload brial 1.2.4 to experimental soon. (Julien, it seems like you forgot to push the upstream and pristine-tar branches, could you do that please if you have them?)
- I'm using singular 4.1.1p2 (The one we have in experimental, 4.1.1p3, is not good, see https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/25993)
- One needs to rebuild pynac against the singular version in use.

So anyone willing to help polish this needs to build some packages from git for now. Many of the failing tests are deprecation warnings from ipywidgets. It would be good if that could be updated.

We also have to keep in mind that the buster freeze starts on January 12, 2019 with the transition freeze. We should try to have a nicely working sagemath package in testing by then. It doesn't look too bad, sagemath 8.3 is almost transitioning to testing already. It also seems that it was decided to ship Python 2 in buster (see https://lwn.net/Articles/756628/).

Best,
Tobias