Bug#844563: ITP: maxima-sage -- Computer algebra system for SageMath

[Tobias Hansen <thansen@debian.org>]

Package: wnpp
Owner: Tobias Hansen <thansen@debian.org>
Severity: wishlist

* Package name    : maxima-sage
  Version         : 5.35.1
  Upstream Author : James Amundson <amundson@fnal.gov>
* URL             : http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
* License         : GPL
  Programming Lang: Common Lisp
  Description     : Computer algebra system for SageMath

 Maxima is a fully symbolic computation program.  It is full featured
 doing symbolic manipulation of polynomials, matrices, rational
 functions, integration, Todd-coxeter methods for finite group
 analysis, graphing, multiple precision floating point computation.
 It has a symbolic source level debugger for maxima code.  Maxima is
 based on the original Macsyma developed at MIT in the 1970s.  It is
 quite reliable, and has good garbage collection, and no memory leaks.
 It comes with hundreds of self tests.
 .
 The maxima-sage packages are meant to be used together with SageMath.
 They contain the version of Maxima that works together with the
 SageMath version in Debian and use ECL instead of GCL as Lisp compiler.
 To use Maxima by itself, the more complete and up-to-date maxima
 package is recommended.

There are several reasons why SageMath cannot use Debian's maxima
package at the moment and this second package maxima-sage is needed:

 1. Version mismatch

 SageMath 7.4 uses Maxima 5.35.1, while the maxima package in Debian is
constantly updated to follow new upstream versions. Currently the
version of maxima in Debian is 5.38.1. It is not trivial to update
SageMath to a new Maxima version, as this ticket for the Maxima 5.38.1
update shows:

 https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/18920

 2. Lisp compiler

 The maxima package in Debian uses only GCL as common lisp compiler,
while SageMath uses ECL. SageMath cannot use the GCL version, since the
preferred interface to Maxima is via an ECL fasl library. The
possibility of adding an ECL version of Maxima to the maxima package was
discussed in

 https://bugs.debian.org/779804

This maxima-sage package is coinstallable with the maxima packages in
Debian.