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.

Installation instructions

Short instructions

To install the experimental patches provided by Sage-combinat, you first need to install Sage. You have two options.
- Binary installation (takes less time; only option on Windows; only works if a binary exists for your system):
  1. Download a binary distribution from http://sagemath.org/download.html and follow the installation instructions on that page.
- Source installation (recommended, but time-consuming; works for Linux and OSX as long as you have a compilier):
  1. Download the source code archive for the latest version http://sagemath.org/download-source.html.
  2. Extract the archive (change the version number appropriately):
    - ```
    tar -xvf sage-4.1.tar
```
3. Compile (this may take several hours):
  - ```
  cd sage-4.1
  make
```
  See http://sagemath.org/download-source.html for more detailed installation instructions.
Install Sage-combinat:
- ```
./sage -combinat install
```

Long instructions

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

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.

Who are we?

How to participate and contribute

Communication

Join our mailing lists:
- Announcement mailing list (to come)
- sage-combinat-devel: Developpers 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).
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 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