On 7/17/07, Georges Khaznadar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, I would like to make a Debian package of Sage. > > I recently attended a talk of Professor Tsai who uses it in Taiwan, and > it was pretty convincing. > > Apparently, Sage depends on other software which should be packaged > separately, according to the "Debian way". With the source packages, the > dependencies were solved by including the other software's sources in > the tree. I already noticed such habits in other upstrean packages I > have "debianised" recently. > > Please have you any hint of interesting informations about the relations > between the development of Sage and the other packages it depends on?
Creating a .deb for SAGE has been discussed a few times on sage-devel, so there is definitely strong interest in doing it. Probably people have attempted it 4 times now, but everybody has failed, except Bobby Moretti one year ago (who unfortunately didn't maintain what he did). If you want to succeed at making a SAGE .deb, here is what you'll likely do: (1) Create a monolothic .deb, which installs everything SAGE currently distributes in /opt/sage/, along with a run script /usr/bin/sage. Basically this involves modifying the make file in the SAGE source distribution so that it works with the Debian packaging tools. Bobby (who I've cc'd), might be kind enough to give you further tips. (2) Only after having completely mastering (1), move on to considering breaking up SAGE into smaller packages and installing into the standard Debian environment. Most people are extremely reluctant to do (1), because it violates the "Debian way". It is however, *definitely* the right first thing to do, and has substantial benefits over the tarball/source distribution we are currently distributing, so it is well worth doing. Note that in (1), creating the .deb package should be so easy that any user with SAGE installed from source and all the appropriate Debian package tools should be able to just type "sage -pkg_deb foo.deb" and get a Debian package. This ease is critical for long term maintainability. Doing (2) is probably way way too much work for anybody who couldn't easily do (1), which is another argument for doing (1) first. Anybody who could do (2) could easily do (1), and doing (1) would actually work and have great benefit to SAGE users; most typical mathematicians wouldn't notice any difference between (1) and (2), even though (2) is vastly more difficult. Thanks for any help!! -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
