On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 5:19 AM E. Madison Bray <erik.m.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 6:38 PM Michael Orlitzky <mich...@orlitzky.com> > wrote: > > > > 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. > > We have already adopted a couple libraries under the umbrella of the > sagemath org on GitLab: > > https://gitlab.com/sagemath > > Most notably lcalc and zn_poly (I have been maintaining somewhat the > latter; I also started a few months ago on an effort to redo its built > system but the whole thing is a bit of a mess and I got sidetracked > and didn't finish...). In each case I believe that was with > permission of their original authors. > > Looking in the latest source tarball for SYMMETRICA there are > absolutely zero license or copyright notifications. And if the author > is deceased, does that mean it's public domain? I don't know. > I found this license: https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Symmetrica#tab=Details > > What I did with zn_poly, as there was no existing repository for it > either, is I got as many source tarballs for as many versions as I > could, unpacked each one in chronological order into a git repository, > and committed and tagged each version. So at least now there is a > version history represented in the repository: > > https://gitlab.com/sagemath/zn_poly/commits/master > > I then also applied each existing patch that was maintained in > SageMath, or at least those that seemed generally applicable. I also > added some meager continuous integration: > > https://gitlab.com/sagemath/zn_poly/pipelines > > How many different source tarballs for symmetrica do we have? > Effectively we only need the most recent, though it would be nice for > historical preservation to try to find older versions as well. Then, > if you want to volunteer to help maintain it, I can help you set that > up as we did with lcalc and zn_poly. > > -- > 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/CAOTD34aEY__CK71wvy%2B3sE6Ez20RTvasfYyczz7f7Dqh2poVzA%40mail.gmail.com > . > -- 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/CAEQuuAX5GGnQL_1pvq06hW%2Bhx3ttOF3BV3A5NTNzBRq72poajw%40mail.gmail.com.
