Hi. Rogério, you can drop me from recipients list, I'm already subscribed to the bug and to debian-science. Il 19/07/2010 18:26, Rogério Brito ha scritto: >> 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 having sagemath: they are only opposed to having the package too outdated. Yes, that's my interpretation too. But I think that, in order to have good communication with upstream, we'll have to show that the package can be maintained and won't fall forgotten as last time. This won't be easy. I agree that the first pace is to try again to have a working package, then understand which are the difficulties and decide whether we're able to go forth with it. >> 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. I fully agree with this program. > 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. +1 for git, is my preferred VCS too. >> 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. :-) Of course! :-) > 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. I'm not sure it's a good idea to put such a complex package in volatile: it's very difficult to make an update without disrupting things, I guess. Anyway, I think the main problem is not having an old package, but one that is not working. Having an old package with perhaps old, but working, features seems to be tolerable (and, as a matter of fact, it's what happen to most stable packages). Ciao, Giovanni. -- Giovanni Mascellani <mascellani@poisson.phc.unipi.it> Pisa, Italy Web: http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~mascellani Jabber: g.mascellani@jabber.org / giovanni@elabor.homelinux.org
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