On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 12:42, Ionut Biru <biru.ionut@gmail.com> wrote:

and here is my official sponsorship message. I know him from irc, he's helping in our channel and also in -bugs and aur. He helped in the last bug days and is active on the bugtracker.

So, let the discussion period officially begin.

-- Ionut

I've seen him on IRC also, and he's always helpful. +1

My main goals initially are maintaining [community] packages which includes fixing bugs in those packages, and maintaining the integrity of the AUR, for instance, looking over PKGBUILDs submitted to the AUR and responding to comments made in aur-general. I'm mainly interested in science/math/unix-philosophy packages. Although there aren't many of those that are orphans in the community repos right now. I could also maintain other orphans, most notably the outdated ones, in community for some time just to update and tidy them up. I am not necessarily that interested in developing the web site, although if there are any outstanding problems I can certainly take a look at the problems. P.S. If you think grass is bad, you should see sage-mathematics!!! :P On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 1:04 PM, Daniel J Griffiths (Ghost1227) <ghost1227@archlinux.us> wrote:

On 06/09/10 at 11:29am, Thomas Dziedzic wrote:

...

Hello,

My name is Thomas Dziedzic. I recently applied to the Junior Developer program, but I was not accepted because of the quantity of people that applied. Allan McRae suggested that I should apply to be a TU so here I am. I have contacted Ionuț Bîru (wonder) and he has agreed to sponsor me. This will mainly be a reiteration of my JD program application. Now, onto some background about me.

I got started with open source software several years ago mainly out of curiosity by installing a linux distro (mandrake). Some OSs that I have used before archlinux include: mandrake (now mandriva), debian, opensuse, fedora core (now fedora), slackware, freebsd, ubuntu, and many others. Now my distro hopping days are mostly over thanks to archlinux and virtualbox.

I have been using archlinux on my desktop for at least 2 years now. I go by the following nicks, td123 on irc/aur, and tomd123 on bbs/bugs/wiki.

I currently maintain 78 packages in the aur. [1] I keep them mostly up to date and bug free. I know some of the packages aren't perfect but most (if not all) work. Most importantly, I don't ignore user requests/problem reports. I also go through some bug reports and help out where ever I can.

I am fairly comfortable with writing packages for archlinux. I am also comfortable fixing bugs in the packages. I currently don't actively track upstream development of any packages, mainly because I don't have a need to. Occasionally, if I'm curious about certain features or just want to check out the changes/progress, I will check the repo logs or the changelog. I am mainly interested in maintaining scientific/mathematical apps along with apps that follow the unix philosophy.

Initially, I would be interested in knowing if I could move sage-mathematics from the AUR to community. Also, I would be interested in adopting grass from community.

I am hoping that I will get accepted so I can help improve archlinux even more!

-Thomas Dziedzic

[1] - http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?SeB=m&K=td123

I've seen you around and don't have anything bad to say about you, so that's a start... In regards to you adopting grass if you get the position, PLEASE DO!!! I hate rebuilding that damn thing :P I have one question for you though... You mentioned wanting to move one package to [community], and an interest in adopting one other, but what do you really want to do as a Trusted User? Is there a specific group of packages that you are interested in maintaining? As you interested in helping out with site development or the AUR? Basically, what are your goals for becoming a Trusted User? --

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 2:52 PM, Stefan Husmann <stefan-husmann@t-online.de> wrote:

Am 09.06.2010 20:53, schrieb Thomas Dziedzic:

...

My main goals initially are maintaining [community] packages which includes fixing bugs in those packages, and maintaining the integrity of the AUR, for instance, looking over PKGBUILDs submitted to the AUR and responding to comments made in aur-general.

I'm mainly interested in science/math/unix-philosophy packages. Although there aren't many of those that are orphans in the community repos right now. I could also maintain other orphans, most notably the outdated ones, in community for some time just to update and tidy them up.

I am not necessarily that interested in developing the web site, although if there are any outstanding problems I can certainly take a look at the problems.

P.S. If you think grass is bad, you should see sage-mathematics!!! :P

well, sage-mathematics is not a package, it is a distribution (btw, do you know scilab?). Some years ago I asked on this list if it should go to community, and the short discussion ended in the conclusion, that it should not. But I am fine with disussing it again.

I wish you good luck for your application.

Stefan

I guess you could call it a distribution which puts a lot of tools under a common interface because that's basically what it is. Afaik, the programs that come with it are isolated to the package. Too bad it wont make it to community then, since I was hoping to spare a lot of compilation time for people :P With regard to scilab, I haven't used it myself, but it certainly looks interesting. I'll take a look at it later today.

Hi, Sorry for diverting the thread, but since there was some discussion about this, I wanted to ask. On Wednesday 09 Jun 2010 at 21:15 Thomas Dziedzic wrote:

...

well, sage-mathematics is not a package, it is a distribution (btw, do you know scilab?). Some years ago I asked on this list if it should go to community, and the short discussion ended in the conclusion, that it should not. But I am fine with disussing it again.

I guess you could call it a distribution which puts a lot of tools under a common interface because that's basically what it is. Afaik, the programs that come with it are isolated to the package. Too bad it wont make it to community then, since I was hoping to spare a lot of compilation time for people :P

I installed the sage-mathematics package from the AUR recently, and yes, the whole way it's put together seems a mess (though this seemed more to do with sage itself than the way it's packaged). But my question is this - I've had some of the constituent parts which make up sage installed for a while, so didn't really want to have another whole version of them installed in /opt just so I could use them through the sage interface. That seemed like a mess. Is it possible to organise this such that it build of the constituent parts, rather than installs two versions of them? (Or is it basically an inherent problem caused by the way that sage requires them to be distributed?) Cheers, Pete.

On Wednesday 09 Jun 2010 at 23:31 Xyne wrote:

Incidentally, I remember that when I compiled it the package duplicated several other packages, e.g. maxima, because it includes other applications internally. Is there any way (yet) to make it use other packages instead? If not, does it fully provide any other packages?

Yes, this is exactly what I was trying to describe in my previous post - thanks for stating it clearer than me. And I think your suggestions are what is needed.

* The idea of an "arch-science" team comes to mind, similar to the "arch-haskell" team, which has done great work in making Arch useful for Haskell users, but I don't actually have any concrete ideas of what that would entail.

I'd be interested in helping out with this :-) Pete.

I took a longer look at their build/install system, and it doesn't look like it is very flexible in using external packages. It fully provides http://www.sagemath.org/packages/standard/ by default. These packages are optional http://www.sagemath.org/packages/optional/ which you would have to install after installing sage-mathematics afaik. Also, another optional package is in http://www.sagemath.org/sagedb/ which is basically a database that's worth a 2.6GB download :/ I have contacted upstream in case there is a relatively sane way of using external packages that come with the distro. I will post back if upstream says it's possible, but it looks like it won't be possible.

Mandriva has had a sage package built with external apps for a while which works quite well [1], it could be interesting to see if their spec file can be translated to a PKGBUILD. Also gentoo has a split ebuild here [2]. See also [3] for the Fedora plans for a package, although it seems stalled at the moment. [1] http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi- bin/viewvc.cgi/packages/cooker/sagemath/current/SPECS/sagemath.spec?view=co [2] http://github.com/cschwan/sage-on-gentoo [3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/SciTech/SAGE

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 2:29 AM, A Rojas <nqn1976list@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I took a longer look at their build/install system, and it doesn't look like it is very flexible in using external packages. It fully provides http://www.sagemath.org/packages/standard/ by default. These packages are optional http://www.sagemath.org/packages/optional/ which you would have to install after installing sage-mathematics afaik. Also, another optional package is in http://www.sagemath.org/sagedb/ which is basically a database that's worth a 2.6GB download :/ I have contacted upstream in case there is a relatively sane way of using external packages that come with the distro. I will post back if upstream says it's possible, but it looks like it won't be possible.

Mandriva has had a sage package built with external apps for a while which works quite well [1], it could be interesting to see if their spec file can be translated to a PKGBUILD. Also gentoo has a split ebuild here [2]. See also [3] for the Fedora plans for a package, although it seems stalled at the moment.

[1] http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi- bin/viewvc.cgi/packages/cooker/sagemath/current/SPECS/sagemath.spec?view=co [2] http://github.com/cschwan/sage-on-gentoo [3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/SciTech/SAGE

Interesting, looking at the spec file, it looks like a major pita. I'll look over it more thoroughly and see exactly what it does to see if I could possibly create a PKGBUILD

Hello,

I am the former maintainer of the sage-mathematics package in AUR. At the time I asked for inclusion in community it was not packaged in the install file, but using a "regular" PKGBUILD. This method stopped working later. The main reason for not including it was the mentioned duplication of packages. I believe this issue would be difficult to solve. The packages sage uses are mostly altered in a way to make them integrate into the "distribution". I do not know if there is a complete list of changes they made, even a complete list of packages they changed.

I was sometimes thinkig about a arch-sage-distribution, that consists of the arch core packages, sage as base system, and that takes care of not installing packages that are included in sage from the arch repos. I am not sure if this is technically doable or advisable. One would have two package managers, pacman and spkg.

Regards Stefan

Thanks for the clarification. I don't think the duplication itself should be an issue. I agree that it is somewhat a waste of diskspace, but overall I would not expect it to be significant. Bandwidth might be an issue, but if the Sage package fully provides many of its internal packages then users who intend to use Sage would not need to download those other packages. This might require some initial work on the PKGBUILD to make sure that the provided packages behave as expected and can be used to satisfy other dependencies, but that should not require continuous effort. Ideally the package would simply use external deps and optdeps but I understand that the alteration of packages makes this difficult. I would prefer the upstream devs to work together to provide the necessary interfaces by default so the Sage devs wouldn't have to hack everything together. Hopefully this will change in the future. Given what we have now, the question is whether the extra diskspace is worth the total amount of compilation time that users currently incur for building sage from source. Given the package's popularity, I'm inclined to say it is. If Thomas' application is accepted, he can even occasionally nag upstream to clean up their build scripts and modularize the package.* Regards, Xyne * New Arch Linux position: UN - upstream nagger :P