On 06/05/2008, Kapil Hari Paranjape <kapil@imsc.res.in> wrote:
For example, SAGE wanted a particular version of "gpari" with some
patches. The actual version of "gpari" in Debian is different.
It's a bit worse than that. I asked William Stein about it a while ago
when I had wild dreams of embarking on the Sage packaging myself.
Sage patches pretty much all of the packages it ships. It patches
Maxima, for example, which apparently breaks everything with each new
release and Will Stein doesnt' like, and it also patches Octave. It
seems to me to be a bit worse than the problems that people faced when
packaging OO.o, which also shipped with its own Java implementation.