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Developing for Sagemath

Posted on 2 mins read

For my first post, I’ll explain how to begin developing for Sagemath. This post is essentially a gist that I shared with members of the UW Sage Seminar. This is a short version of the official guide.

Official Sagemath guide

Setting up local development copy

The first task will be to obtain a local development copy of Sagemath.

  • Clone Sagemath and checkout the develop branch
git clone https://github.com/sagemath/sage
cd ~/sage
git checkout develop
  • Build Sagemath. I had access to a 48 thread machine so I used all 48 threads. It was a shared computer so I also assigned the build process a nice level of 19. This will take between 30 minutes to 6 hours so we’ll move on to the next step while this is going.
cd ~/sage
export MAKE='make -j 48'
nice -n 19 make build

Developing via trac

Sagemath development is done through the Sagemath trac server: https://trac.sagemath.org/. We now setup our local git repository to interact with this server easily.

  • The new way to get a Sagemath-trac account is to use your Github account. Click on “Github Login” on the main Sagemath-trac page.

  • The Sagemath people made a cool tool called git-trac-command (https://github.com/sagemath/git-trac-command). This tool provides the git trac subcommand helps our local git repository interface with the Sagemath-trac server. Install this package.

cd
git clone https://github.com/sagemath/git-trac-command
cd ~/git-trac-command
python setup.py install --user
  • We can now authenticate using username/token. The username is list on the Sagemath-trac page. It is also gh.yourgithubname. The token is listed under account preferences.
cd ~/sage
git trac config --user USERNAME --token TOKEN
  • We also need to authenticate with ssh keys. So first generate the keys.
cd
ssh-keygen # follow the prompts or spam <ENTER>
cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub
  • The output of the previous command is your ssh public key. Copy this over to your account preferences under ssh keys.

Make a ticket!!

  • Hit the new ticket button.
  • Fill in what it asks.

Checkout the ticket

  • Now checkout the ticket in your local development copy.
cd ~/sage
git trac checkout <ticket number>

Make a commit

  • Perform some edits.
  • git add filename to tell git to track these edits.
  • git commit -m "<one line description>" to make a commit.
  • git trac push to send to the trac server.
  • When ready, modify the ticket and set to “Need Review”.