Hello sage-devel and sage-packaging,
I propose to upgrade the PARI package to the git master version instead
of the current released version.
The main motivation for me is to use the new plotting engine for the
PARI Jupyter kernel. The plotting engine has changed a lot since the
stable release. This is split into many commits and it affects even the
build system, so I think it would be too much work to do this with a
patch. Currently, I do have plotting support in my PARI Jupyter kernel,
but it requires patches which were written by me but substantially
changed by upstream PARI. So it doesn't work with any upstream version
of PARI and I want to fix this. In the current stable release, plotting
is implemented only in the GP command line program, not in the PARI
library. So a stable release cannot work for me.
A second motivation is that stable releases of PARI are very slow. The
most recent stable PARI releases (excluding bugfix releases) were in
november 2016, march 2014 and june 2011. Upgrading now to git master
gives the advantage that we can profit from improvements in PARI. It
will also make the transition to the next stable release easier: the
large time between stable releases implies many changes. Since many
components of Sage use PARI, there are a substantial number of changes
needed in Sage with every PARI upgrade. By doing this upgrade in steps,
this becomes more manageable.
Many versions of Sage have used git versions of PARI, for the second
reason I mentioned above. So there is certainly a precedent for doing this.
I do know that this request is controversial because distributions are
not likely to accept a "git master" version. However, I feel that I
cannot make progress with the PARI Jupyter kernel unless this is
resolved. So I would like distributions to accept that Sage is moving
again to a git master version of PARI. If it worked in the past with
older Sage and PARI versions, it should also work in the future.
I didn't make a Trac ticket for this yet precisely because I know it is
controversial.
Comments? Suggestions?
Jeroen.
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