As pointed out by Samuel last month [1] the transition freeze (i.e. new package versions) for the next major Debian release (buster) is coming up January 12 [2]. This is important for Sage and those working to package Sage for Debian, as it will impact what version of Sage is available in Debian, and by extension big name Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu and Mint that carry with them probably the majority of users on Linux.
Setting what version of Sage will be in Debian, prior to the freeze, is not such a big deal in its own right as not many packages depend on Sage. However, it does impact what versions of Sage's many dependencies can be included, and GAP perhaps has the largest impact there, as there are also many packages that depend on GAP (mostly GAP packages). The biggest sticking point right now to packaging Sage for Debian is thus what version of GAP can go in Debian as well (and I don't think the GAP community will be too happy about it if the GAP version gets held back because of Sage; though the more likely outcome there is that Sage gets held back (or excluded entirely) if it can't work with the new GAP). Thus some of us have been working hard to find a working convergence between Sage and GAP 4.10.x. That work is nearly ready [3] (pending some needed patches to GAP), and given the normal rate of Sage's release cycle it would be a shame to have this work excluded from Sage 8.5, considering that it is the major blocker for Debian. Therefore I propose doing a few more rounds of Sage 8.5 pre-releases specifically with the focus of upgrading GAP: Completing #22626 which I think will be ready-enough by tomorrow (I would prefer to wait until GAP 4.10.1 is out but starting testing now would be better) and sending it to the patchbots, while putting a hold on any other non-critical fixes. If for some reason that's impossible then we should quickly release a Sage 8.6 that is focused primarily on GAP 4.10 compatibility. Thanks, Erik [1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sage-devel/ztLmB2xWFig/kWk7LGycCQAJ [2] https://release.debian.org/buster/freeze_policy.html [3] https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/22626 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
