Re: Bug#573538: Packaging again sagemath
Hi, Giovanni.
On Jul 19 2010, Giovanni Mascellani wrote:
> Thanks for your feedback. Unfortunately in the meantime upstream's
> reaction wasn't really the one I'd liked more[1].
Thank you very much for your reply.
> http://groups.google.com.au/group/debian-sage/browse_thread/thread/20e092f1b11e6f02
I did not know about this reaction, but I can understand where they are
coming from: it seems that sage is updated regularly and the Debian
packaging is rotting in unstable. [1]
[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sagemath.html
The package is not installable for quite some time and I think that, in
the current situation, it will never be part of any stable release,
which is one of the justifications for it to be removed from the
archives.
> Anyway, maybe these issues can be solved, if we talk with upstream and,
> above all, we can find a few people to comaintain the package.
If I understood them correctly, they are not 100% opposed to the idea of
having sagemath: they are only opposed to having the package too outdated.
> Working with a non collaborative upstream would be very frustrating on
> such big package (it is frustrating on much more stupid packages...).
Well, I think that a public repository for packaging it would be a very
good start (Tim, do you have any?). Some of the big tasks that I would
like to see addressed regarding sagemath would be:
* getting a first draft package done, even if "improper for public
consumption".
* relaxing the huge amount of dependencies (dropping them to recommends,
instead).
* modularizing things as much as possible.
* getting patches fed up to other upstream packages.
Of course, packaging sagemath is a very big task, basing myself only on
the list of programs that it embraces.
> Unfortunately, I won't come (even if I hope to be in Banja Luka 2011).
> Good luck! :-)
Thanks. I hope to go also to Banja Luka. :-)
> After announcing my interest, I didn't invest any time in sage, partly
> because of upstream's reaction I mentioned above, partly because I
> wanted to finish to work on some packages I'm already busy on.
OK. I did not have time to play with it yet, but now that I completed
some tasks (read: playing with the port of xpdf to use libpoppler and
other small stuff), I think that I can reserve some time for another
package, especially if we can put everything under a git repository,
which will be convenient for the development.
And I am happy to teach the little that I know about maintaining
projects with git.
> However, I really don't think that sagemath will be part of squeeze, I
> guess we'll have to wait at least squeeze+1.
I am not very ambitious regarding getting it to be part of squeeze, but
just having it in Debian, in a working situation is way better than the
current situation. :-)
Seeing upstream's reaction makes me think that, perhaps, the best option
for packaging sagemath would be to place it in volatile [2], so that it can
always be close to what upstream wants and also what users can use.
[2] http://www.debian.org/volatile/
Regards,
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
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