[Debian-science-sagemath] [sage-devel] Upcoming Debian freeze

[E. Madison Bray]

On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 11:28 AM Tobias Hansen <thansen at debian.org> wrote:
>
> On 1/5/19 1:18 PM, Thierry wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > could Debian maintainers please explicitely tell us on the sage-devel
> > mailing-list what should be done soon so that 8.6 could enter forthcoming
> > buster release with recent dependencies (gap 4.10, etc) ? Also, what are
> > the deadlines ?
> >
> > In particular, i noticed that networkx in buster will be version 2.2 [1],
> > so should #26326 be set as blocker ?
> >
> > I noticed that sagemath disapeared from testing [2], is there a way we
> > could help fixing that with 8.6 ?
> >
> > Ciao,
> > Thierry
> >
> > [1] https://packages.debian.org/buster/python-networkx
> > [2] https://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?keywords=sagemath&searchon=names&subword=1&version=all&release=all
> >
> Hi,
>
> I think the main bottleneck at the moment is manpower for working directly on the sagemath package. I'm on vacation until January 13. Right now the sagemath 8.4 (with patched in support for gap 4.10 and networkx 2.2 etc) builds in Debian unstable and should be on the way to migrate to testing. [1] Since it was built with numpy 1.16 it can only migrate to testing when that migrates. Since I'm short on time I could just make the package build, but did not have much time to look at the doctests that are still failing. See [2] for an overview and links to the build logs. If someone could check for important failures (and fixes), that would be appreciated. If people could test the package and report bugs that would be helpful too.
>
> The freeze is described in [3]. The transition freeze on January 12 does probably not affect us much, but the soft freeze on February 12 means that sagemath must be in testing before that date. Preferably sagemath 8.6. I already updated the package to 8.6.beta1 in git and could upload 8.6.* to Debian experimental soon to make build logs available.
>
> Directly on the sage side I think the only thing you can do to help is to release 8.6 in time (maybe around January 17?) so that it can be uploaded to unstable soon and migrate to Debian testing before the soft freeze on February 12. Testing migration is not very predictable. New bug reports or uploads of other packages can cause unexpected dalays.

Could somebody help explain exactly what the difference is between the
"transition freeze" and the "soft freeze"?  I was under the impression
that we were working more up against the transition freeze on January
12.  Is the idea there just to not make any major package version
changes that break other packages?  For Sage that's relatively easy
since it's near the bottom of the dependency tree.  8.6.rc0 is out
now, so 8.6 should be out in time for that.

I'm building Sage on Debian unstable now and will look into some of
the remaining doctest failures in the meantime.