Macaulay2 for Debian
====================

orig tarballs
-------------
Since moving to git several years ago, the upstream maintainers no
longer publish tarballs on their website. Tags mark the beginning of
work on a new version, and not a stable release. Instead, the most
stable version of release X.Y lives at the HEAD of the release-X.Y
branch.

For the Debian package, we would like a way of using uscan to keep
track of new releases and easily download tarballs for building
packages. The following page was designed to facilitate this:
https://science-team.pages.debian.net/macaulay2/

We keep track of releases using a Python script running on a Salsa
pipeline schedule. The newest release-X.Y branch is identified, and as
new commits appear, new tarballs are created. These tarballs also
include the contents of the M2-emacs submodule. The version number is
a slightly modified form of the output of git describe --tags.

Source code for the Python script is available at
https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/macaulay2/-/tree/watch.

Javascript libraries
--------------------
The Visualize package makes use of a number of Javascript libraries
that are shipped as embedded code in the upstream source.  We have
repacked the tarball to remove these copies for the libraries already
present in Debian.  Two remain, at least until they can be packaged
for Debian:

* BootSideMenu (ITP #960097)
* noUiSlider (ITP #960618)

We have provided the full source code (in debian/missing-sources) for
noUiSlider, obtained from https://github.com/leongersen/noUiSlider/tree/8.5.1.
Macaulay2 only provides the minified source.

roots
-----
The "roots" function, which finds the roots of a polynomial, is disabled
until the library that it uses, mpsolve, which is currently in the NEW queue,
arrives in Debian.

 -- Doug Torrance <dtorrance@piedmont.edu>, Thu,  9 Jul 2020 00:35:55 -0400
