Package: wnpp Owner: Tobias Hansen <than...@debian.org> Severity: wishlist
* Package name : maxima-sage Version : 5.35.1 Upstream Author : James Amundson <amund...@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.