SageMath uses a few packages that appear to have been abandoned upstream. The most recent example I have in mind is Symmetrica:
http://www.algorithm.uni-bayreuth.de/en/research/SYMMETRICA/ The package's website (symmetrica.de) and contact address are both dead. The upstream contact (Axel Kohnert) listed in SPKG.txt also has a dead email address on the Bayreuth site. Since the last release was over a decade ago, it contains a lot of old bugs, and we've been patching it ourselves over the years. So has everyone that ships it: Gentoo[0], Arch[1], Debian[2], Conda[3], Fedora[4], etc. At some point, it becomes a waste of time to duplicate this effort. And presumably, SageMath is the only modern consumer of the library. What do people think about adopting these sorts of packages under the SageMath umbrella (on Github?) where we can maintain them properly and make new releases? My end-game here is that I would like to add Symmetrica to Gentoo, since Dima was kind enough to add support for a system copy in Trac #28208. But I don't want to be in the business of adding dead software to the main repository, or of patching a tarball from 2008 myself for eternity. [0] https://github.com/cschwan/sage-on-gentoo/tree/master/sci-libs/symmetrica/files [1] https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk?h=packages/symmetrica [2] https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/symmetrica/tree/master/debian/patches [3] https://anaconda.org/isuruf/symmetrica/files [4] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/symmetrica/tree/master -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/940a6988-5f6e-34c9-d63e-7b28ce0bd6dc%40orlitzky.com.
