Re: [PATCH] Add GAP.

[Nicolas Goaziou]

Hello,

Andreas Enge <address@hidden> writes:

> the attached patch adds the computer algebra system for group theory GAP.
> I am only interested in it as an input to SAGE, but it appears that someone
> on IRC was also trying to package it yesterday, so it would be nice if you
> could check whether this package meets your needs.

I was also trying to pave the way towards SAGE. I tested it briefly and,
AFAIC, it looks good. Thank you for the work.

> There is an impressive number of optional GAP packages that are shipped with
> the tarball; for the time being, I included only some of them in the
> installation.

GAP packages require their own input, so they could be considered as
first-class packages in Guix (e.g, define-public gap-sonata), all
propagating gap and setting an appropriate GAP root directory.

OTOH, GAP provides its own mechanism to handle its packages.

> The documentation poses problems: It is included in the tarball, but I thought
> it would be in style to recreate it from source. Adding texlive-minimal is
> not sufficient and creates blank pdf pages (since fonts are missing; I think
> we need to revisit texlive-minimal and make it a little less minimal). Adding
> texlive helps, but now it also ends up in the closure, which is excessive!
> I am wondering whether we could simply drop texlive and delete the bundled
> pdf documentation; the on-line documentation should then still be available.
> What do you think?
>
> Also, I tried to create a separate doc package, but then installing both
> gap and gap:doc into a user profile is not enough: Documentation is searched
> for relatively to the binary, I think. (To check this, I called
> "?LoadPackage" from inside a gap session, which does not work with a separate
> doc package.) Personally, I would be happy with having one package only if we
> delete the pdf documentation: There are then about 35MB of
> documentation.

Considering the educational purpose of GAP, and the sheer size of the
packages involved, I tend to think that 35MB documentation is not much
of a problem. IMO, we should keep it around. 

Of course, a gap:doc ouput seems the best option, provided it can be
made to work. For example, could gap:doc install "doc" directory in
a new location and symlink "lib", "bin", etc. from the original "out"
directory? Then the only thing left to do would be to set GAP_DIR (e.g,
by modifying gap.sh) to "doc" output.


Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Goaziou                                                0x80A93738