[Debian-science-sagemath] fpylll: dependency or dependencee of Sage ?

[Jeroen Demeyer]

On 2016-10-17 15:12, Ximin Luo wrote:
> One way for Debian that is "close to" what you guys are doing, is to yes put the tests in a second package sagemath-distribution. But this makes the maintenance workflow very costly for us.

Why does it make your workflow more costly?

Having a large metapackage (Sage-the-distribution) with many individual 
packages (one of them being Sage-the-library) is a normal thing. See for 
example https://packages.debian.org/jessie/kde-full
Are the Debian KDE maintainers complaining about this?

> Can we please persuade you guys to not make fpylll build-depend on sagelib?

Not me because I don't agree that there is a problem to be solved. If 
you want to persuade other guys, I suggest to email to sage-packaging or 
sage-devel.

> I can see that it's possible to build fpylll without Sage, it will just have a different API. Can't we patch Sage-the-library to use fpylll-without-Sage, then have Sage itself convert the non-Sage integers into Sage integers?

Possibly at the expense of performance. But that is something to discuss 
with the fpylll developers.