Hello all, I'm the maintainer of the sagemath package. Due to the package taking 8 months to get through NEW (resulting in it starting out 8 months out of date) and my founding a startup around the time it entered NEW, I've never had the time to update it across the original 8 months of backlog caused by the NEW process.
I would support removing the package from Debian. An alternative that I think would be better is to move it to Debian experimental (so that if I find someone to work on incrementally updating it, we can do that without having the package go through NEW a second time). Having done some of the work on updating the current sagemath package to sagemath 4+, I'm fairly confident that upstream hasn't changed the structure of their build system and the old package will will save a lot of time for future work on producing a package compliant with Debian policy (e.g. it handles the issues involved in sagemath being distributed as a tarball containing a large number of .tar.bz2 files, of which maybe 10 are original sagemath code and the rest are dependencies, and contains all the code you need to make sagemath link against the system libraries). That said, I don't foresee having the time myself, and have yet to find anyone else who is serious about taking up this project. Upstream is, I think rightly, currently more interested in getting setup their own apt repository that distributes a working sagemath package that just bundles all the dependencies (it's much easier to do, but would not be suitable for inclusion in Debian). Best regards, -Tim Abbott On Thu, 5 Aug 2010, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > retitle 573538 RM: sagemath -- RoQA; broken and outdated; RC-buggy > reassign 573538 ftp.debian.org > severity 573538 normal > thanks > > Hi, > > I'm requesting the removal of the sagemath package. It is completely > outdated in Debian, which makes everybody unhappy (upstream developers, > users). > > It would still be nice to have this software in Debian, but coordinated > efforts and discussions with the upstream community to resolve the open > issues about dependencies on all other pieces of software are required > first. > > The current Debian packaging can be found on > http://snapshot.debian.org/package/sagemath/3.0.5dfsg-5.1/, even if I'm > not too sure that it will be useful as a basis to package sagemath 4+. > > - Lucas > > > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org