Gap4 is a computer algebra system, specifically designed for working in group theory. The version in Debian is slightly out of date and orphaned; I have posted an ITA earlier today.
Gap4 is quite big and I could use some advice on how to split it up. Upstream, gap4 (version 4.3) is distributed in two tar-balls, currently gap4r3.tar.gz (47Mb) and fix4r3n4.tar.gz (1.1Mb). The second one basically contains patches. (There are also contributed packages for gap; I'll see if it is worthwhile to distribute those as well.) In Debian, gap4 (version 4.2) is currently distributed as 6 source packages giving 8 binary packages: gap4 (4.4Mb) (giving binary packages gap4 (3.8Mb), gap4-gac (2.0Mb), gap4-test (0.2Mb)) gap4-doc-dvi (1.1Mb), gap4-doc-html (0.8Mb), gap4-doc-ps (2.1Mb), gap4-gdat (16.7Mb), gap4-tdat (6.8Mb). (As an aside, if you sum the sizes of all the source packages, you only get to 31.9Mb. I don't know yet if gap really grew by 15Mb from version 4.2 to version 4.3 or if something else is going on). The reason for this splitting up is, I think, that whenever there is an upstream bug fix release, the huge tables (in -gdat and -tdat) and the documentation is unlikely to change. However, looking through the bugfixes for version 4.3, this seems to be false. Well, the documentation didn't change, but the tables did. So I'm inclined to simplify packaging by making only a single source package (and still the same binary packages - the tables and the documentation are architecture independent, of course). This would mean superfluous uploads of the documentation binary packages whenever upstream has a bug fix release, but those are relatively small. The tables would have to be renewed anyway, it seems. Can anyone think of a reason why I shouldn't do this? Peter van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
