Ubuntu
sagemath package

Cantor (with Sage Math) Crashes in Ubuntu 11.10

Asked by Brandon Curtis

I am running a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.10 x64.

I wish to use the mathematical software 'Sage Math' (http://sagemath.org/) via the Cantor front-end, and I have encountered several problems.

I installed Cantor from the Ubuntu Software Center.

Problem #1: Selecting the 'Sage Math' plugin does not automatically install Sage. It must be installed manually, and the path to Sage executable must then be provided to Cantor.

Problem #2: Sage throws cryptic errors and will not launch after manually installing. 'libssl0.9.8' must be installed for Sage to run.

At this stage, I was able to launch Sage's native GUI and Sage appeared to be functioning correctly. After providing the Sage path to Cantor, Sage was working correctly through the Cantor interface and everything appeared to be fine. However...

Problem #3: Cantor crashes every single time a saved worksheet is opened.
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I am new to bug reporting (and open-source in general) but I want to make sure that the right people are aware of these problems.
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UPDATE: using the KDE crash reporter, I found that my problem is already reported here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258286

However, it has been marked as 'FIXED' on 2011.06.04 with this description:
"I commited the patch I posted earlier. Can anyone please confirm that the crash is indeed fixed now (as I can not reproduce here), so I can close this bug report?"

Followed by:
"I updated my source code to the newest revision and was not able to reproduce this bug any longer."

However, the version of Cantor in the Ubuntu Software Center still has this problem.
1) Who should I make aware of this, and for the time being 2) where can I get the source code that has been fixed?

Thank you for any help you can provide. I'd much rather support an open-source project than Matlab, and I WANT this to work.

 - Brandon

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mycae (mycae) said : 		#1

sagemath was autoimported from the (volunteer) upstream maintainers in "debian" , and has subsequently been removed from debian due to being "RoQA; broken and outdated; RC-buggy" [1]. It will not appear in future versions of ubuntu.

There is currently no maintainer, and the last discussion that I can find about the topic is located at [2], where the primary problem was that the package was so monolithic that building and debugging was a very long process.

Cantor still produces a sage-backend binary, but it is unclear to me how that is being maintained.You may wish to contact the cantor maintainer at their debian maintainer page [3]. At this time it may be simply advisable for the kdeedu (package providing cantor) maintainer to cut out the cantor-sage backend.

Unfortunately the primary problem here is a lack of resources to tackle this package.

[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sagemath/news/20100807T120434Z.html
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=573538
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/k/kdeedu.html

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