[gentoo-science] Sage, Axiom and FriCAS

[gentoo-science] Sage, Axiom and FriCAS

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

1. I'm on the Axiom mailing lists. There has been a fork of Axiom called
FriCAS, which is in some sense I don't quite understand, associated with
the Sage project. The fork started out life as an Axiom developer
wanting to speed up the build process of Axiom, as well as making the
project more responsive to defect fixes as well as new features.

Like many forks, there's a bit of acrimony between the two projects. I'm
a casual user of Axiom -- it's on my list of things to learn, and I've
got it running on my machines both out of Portage and from upstream
source. I'm not ready to "join either camp" -- all I want is something
that works. I am, however, doing some testing this weekend on FriCAS to
see if I can make it work on my Athlon64 X2. If anyone is interested in
FriCAS, the mailing list is at
http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel?hl=en


2. Sage itself is an interesting project that I think belongs in
sci-mathematics, whether or not it contains Axiom or FriCAS. It's mostly
Python wrappers on other scientific libraries. Their home page is
http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/. I've got the source tarball
and plan to do a test build this weekend on the Athlon64 X2. If it
works, I'll probably put an enhancement request in Bugzilla for it. The
source tarball has *all* of the dependencies, I think, so I may have to
do some tweaking to make it take things out of Portage insteas.
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