[Debian-science-sagemath] Required tasks for sage in stretch

[Tobias Hansen]

On 11/09/2016 12:56 PM, Julien Puydt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 09/11/2016 12:36, Tobias Hansen wrote:
>> I'm a bit worried that we might not achieve the goal to get sage into
>> stretch, if we don't focus on the essential tasks.[1] If we do not get
>> all of the following things done in the next 3 or 4 weeks, there will
>> simply be no sage in stretch.
> 
> I'm a bit worried by this Zeitnot : rushing can give us more headaches
> down the line actually maintaining things.

As long as sage depends on specific versions of other software that
cannot be easily replaced by a new version, it will always be hard to
package sage for Debian.

>> * maxima - even updating sage to maxima 5.38.1 is hard (see [2]) and
>> then there is the gcl vs ecl issue. I begin to think the only way to
>> solve this in time is to have our own package of maxima 5.35.1 with ecl
>> and fasl library.
> 
> That is a difficult point. I got the technical part settled years ago ;
> we're left with the human part.

Since now we also have the version mismatch, now even the technical part
is not settled anymore.

>> * planarity - We need have to figure out how to use the new version
>> packaged in Debian.
> 
> I might try to have a look. It's an upstream sage work.

Note that I filed an issue: https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/21774

>> * linbox - I might need to close RC bugs by disabling tests.
> 
> Those tests might be failing for a good reason.
> 

Yes, but there are several upstream bug reports about this. It's still
better than the broken version that is currently in testing.

> For jmol, it's used for the notebook part and for the documentation if I
> understand well. Or perhaps it's possible to use it in a terminal to
> produce image files too?
> 

I think we could even have the notebooks without jmol, just not the best
3d plotting backend.

Best,
Tobias