Re: 01/01: gnu: Add ratpoints.

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 11:04:35AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > +++ b/gnu/packages/patches/ratpoints-sturm_and_rp_private.patch
> Could you add a sentence or two explaining what the patch does and what
> its upstream status is?  This is especially important for non-trivial
> patches like this one.

Nobody knows :-)  The patch appears without further comments in the Sage
build system.

The upstream code has not changed since 2011, something I have been seeing
a lot over the last few days with seemingly abandoned mathematics code, but
which is not dropped since it is still the most efficient implementation
for solving a given problem. Luckily this one is C, the C++ packages often
do not even compile anymore without specific patches from the Sage project.

In this case, there is hope though, from SPKG.txt:
"NOTE: the ratpoints package has been assimilated by PARI/GP. Therefore,
this package (as Sage package) is deprecated. In the future, it will be
removed from Sage."

So maybe we could move it (again, sorry...), to the sagemath module,
with the plan to drop it as soon as Sage does not need it anymore?

Andreas