[Debian-science-sagemath] singular4

[Ximin Luo]

Jerome BENOIT:
> Hi Again,
> 
> On 12/10/16 14:15, Tobias Hansen wrote:
>> Hi Jerome,
> 
>> could you please be more specific what you are talking about? Is it
>> about my commit to the packaging git to not compress singular.hlp? If
>> yes, sorry about that, I thought it's such a minor change that it's
>> easier that way.
> 
> It is fine, but the issue was elsewhere: the documentation for Singular4
> is absolutely not supported: being able to read a data file is fine,
> reading a faulty one is not.
> 

In terms of technical functionality, I've verified that the uncompressed singular.hlp can still be processed by SageMath 7.3 and the 3 failing tests in src/sage/interfaces/singular.py will now pass. [1] Whether the help text is accurate or up-to-date is a different question, but I think we should still solve the compression issue even if the docs are crap.

However, I just remembered a minor detail of Debian policy [2]:

"Packages must not require the existence of any files in /usr/share/doc/ in order to function [115]. Any files that are used or read by programs but are also useful as stand alone documentation should be installed elsewhere, such as under /usr/share/package/, and then included via symbolic links in /usr/share/doc/package."

I'm not sure the best way to solve this, so I'll leave it to you. Loosely speaking, SageMath does not "need" singular.hlp to function, so we *could* leave things as-is. Strictly speaking, the tests do "need" singular.hlp to pass (unless we disable them), however.

(I didn't file a bug, because this commit was not released yet.)

X

[1] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-science/packages/sagemath.git/commit/?id=0eed64f4d4720dfc7f93b55d6230b690cba9a9da
[2] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#fr115

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