Sage-Combinat

Sage-Combinat is a software project whose mission statement is: to improve the open source mathematical system Sage as an extensible toolbox for computer exploration in algebraic combinatorics, and foster code sharing between researchers in this area.

In practice, Sage-combinat is a collection of experimental patches (i.e. extensions) on top of Sage, developed by a community of researchers. The intent is that most of those patches get eventually integrated into Sage as soon as they are mature enough, with a typical short life-cycle of a few weeks. In other words: just install Sage, and you will benefit from all the Sage-combinat development, except for the latest bleeding edge features.

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Installation instructions

Short instructions

Step 1. To install the experimental patches provided by Sage-combinat, you first need to install Sage. You have two options.

1. Binary installation (takes less time; only option on Windows; only works if a binary exists for your system):

   • Download a binary distribution for your system from http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wstein/binaries/4.1.combinat/ and follow the installation instructions on there

2. Source installation (recommended, but time-consuming; works for Linux and OSX as long as you have a compilier):

   • Download the source code from http://sagemath.org/download-source.html and follow the installation instructions on that page.

Step 2. If you really need the latest features: install the Sage-Combinat patches by running the following command inside the sage directory:

• ./sage -combinat install

This works best with the latest version of Sage (4.1 as of 06/10/2009). If this step fails, please send an email to the sage-combinat-devel mailing list with the error message.

Long instructions

• See the Patch server Step by step tutorial (in particular, how to download Sage-Combinat)

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NEWS

• road map and current status

• February 22-26, 2010: Sage days

  • The thematic month MathInfo 2010 at CIRM, Marseille will include a Sage days session. FlorentHivert, NicolasThiéry, and FrancoSaliola will be among the organizers, there will be a serious combinatorics slant.

• July 25-29, 2009: *-Combinat 2009

  • We will hold an International Sage Workshop on Free and Practical Software for Algebraic Combinatorics at RISC, Linz, Austria, right after FPSAC'09

• May 25th, 2009: The Sage-words library demonstrated at the 2nd Canadian Discrete and Algorithmic Mathematics Conference CanaDAM'09 Sage worksheet, PDF.

• April 15th, 2009: Software demonstration accepted for FPSAC'09 PDF, LaTeX Source LaTeX bibliography

• January 26-30, 2009: Sage-Combinat Workshop in Orsay

• 2008-06-19: MuPAD-Combinat join forces with Sage

  • Sage-combinat was born as a partial port of MuPAD-Combinat. After months of discussions and experiments, an enthusiastic consensus emerged in the MuPAD-Combinat community to join Sage. Sage-combinat henceforth became the natural successor of MuPAD-Combinat.

  • The transition is a massive investment: seven years of hard work to port over! However a lot of experience was gained since 2000, and most of the design is now pretty clear. By sharing the work the transition will hopefuly be relatively quick.

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Who are we?

• Contributors

• Institutions and sponsors

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How to participate and contribute

Communication

• Join our mailing lists:
  • Announcement mailing list (to come)

  • sage-combinat-devel: Developers' mailing list

  • sage-combinat-commits: A low traffic mailing list which receives an automatic notice whenever a sage-combinat related ticket is modified (and eventually whenever a commit is done on the patch server).

  • sage-combinat-days: Mailing list for the organisation of Sage-Combinat days

• Check the road map and current status

• Post bug reports, suggestions, patches on the Sage-Combinat trac server or on the mailing list.

• Cite Sage-Combinat when you use it for research publications (TODO: provide a standard citation here).

Code

• The collection of patches is managed using a patch server (mercurial queues). Use it to try out the latest experimental features, or contribute your own patches! (You may still need to access to the old patch server)

• Please read the Step by step tutorial (in particular, how to download Sage-Combinat)

• For the curious: Technical background on the Sage-Combinat patch server (messy).

• For hg/mercurial lovers: Mercurial: The Definite Guide an e-book by Bryan O'Sullivan

• Mercurial server for miscelleanous files and documents

  • To check them out, use hg clone http://combinat.sagemath.org/misc/ Sage-Combinat-misc-file. This will create a subdirectory Sage-Combinat-misc-file in the current directory; you can use any other name for this subdirectory.

Design

• Have a look and participate to design discussions.

• Contribute to the list of quirks and weirdness issues in the *-Combinat design.

Documentation

• From sage 3.4 on, the documentation system is based on ReST/Sphinx. Here are some help about the new doc system