Kasper Peeters wrote:
Has anyone considered emailing the official maintainer
Tim Abbott <tabb...@mit.edu>
and ask him whether he would be interested in handing over
maintainership to someone with more time to bring the debian package
up to date?
I would be happy to help out with this (including contacting Abbott),
but it will clearly require quite a bit of work because neither Debian
nor Ubuntu like packages which duplicate software already in the
repositories.
Removing sage from Debian/Ubuntu is probably not a good idea, since
those repositories are what those users expect to get their software
from. Usage of my cadabra CAS went up dramatically once it got into
the Ubuntu repositories, even though I had binaries available for
download before that. So it would help a lot to have an up-to-date
sage in those repositories too.
Cheers,
Kasper
One way the maintainers might accept the huge Sage bundle is if we could produce
a big list of changes made to standard packages. Even libz has been patched for
OS X. (There is a new beta which will stop that being necessary).
The maintainers logic is clear they don't want to duplicate stuff. I can
appreciate that. I suggest we approach them, saying we understand this, and that
in general it would be silly to include everything. If we then produce a long
list of packages which have needed to be patched, then it is less likely they
will object.
There are several Solaris-specific patches. This could be used to our advantage
by saying that Sage is multi-platform, and some patches are needed for Solaris.
Maintaining two separate versions of the source code for two different platforms
would present us severe difficulties.
I suspect the Debian people are reasonable and could be persuaded to accept
things if there were aware of just how many patches have needed to be made to
'standard' packages.
One package I think we would have a lot of problem justifying is the inclusion
of 'Mercurial'. Whether Mercurial is a perquisite for Sage or not is debatable,
but including its source code seems unnecessary to me. If someone is going to be
submitting patches based on Mercurial, they are probably quite capable of
installing it themselves.
I personally prefer to use a system wide install, as I can then apply patches
without having built Sage.
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