[bug#56729] [RFC PATCH 00/10] Add sagemath.

[guix]

Hello,

On 2022-08-01T11:24:31+0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > This series adds SageMath. Everything compiles just fine and even the
> > Jupyter notebook interface works, but there is still much work to do. So
> > far, I have only added the minimal set of inputs required for the build
> > to succeed. Tests and documentations are still missing.
> 
> This looks great already!  To make sure things don’t stall, we could
> apply the patch series piecemeal, starting with the dependencies that
> you think are ready, and leaving more time to polish the ‘sagemath’
> package.
> 
> WDYT?
Sounds like a good idea. The updates all seem fine to me (except gap)
and other than perhaps a better description for python-memory-allocator
I don't think there is much left to do for the other ones.

As for gap, I took another stab at it and it now builds reproducibly for
me. I also removed all the trailing #t's and changed the phases to use a
gexp.
By the way, the gap definition contains a snippet that deletes many gap
packages over concerns due to missing explicit licenses. However in a
cursory look at the tarball, I can see many LICENSE/COPYING files so
that may have changed.

> Regarding SageMath, my understanding is that it bundles lots of things.
> In Guix, we’d like to make sure we do not use the bundled packages,
> unless we practically can’t avoid it.  To do that, the best option is to
> remove “third-party” (or similar) directories right in the ‘snippet’ of
> the ‘sagemath’ package.  Could you give that a try?
If I understand the Sage build system correctly, missing dependencies
are automatically retrieved and build only when using the provided
Makefile. As is, the package definition builds and installs only the
python library part using setup.py. Thus a missing dependency probably
leads to a runtime error, though I haven't checked this.

> Then, as you note, we’d rather run tests to make sure the package works
> as intended.
I will try to see if I can get tests to work, though probably as
separate "package" like nixpkgs does[0], to avoid rebuilding sagemath so
often :).

As for sagemath itself, I will have a look at what exactly we need in
bin/.

[0]:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applications/science/math/sage/sage-tests.nix