Inclusion Procedure for New Packages

For a package to become part of Sage’s standard distribution, it must meet the following requirements:

• License. The license must be a GPL version 2+ compatible license.

• Build Support. The code must build on the following supported architectures and compilers (and intended port targets):

  • Linux: x86, x86_64, Itanium, ppc, ppc64, Sparc (gcc 3.4–4.3)
  • Apple Mac OS X: ppc, ppc64, x86, x86_64 (Xcode 2.5+)
  • Microsoft Windows: x86, x86_64 MSVC 2005/Intel Fortran (MinGW or Cygwin support is insufficient!)
  • Solaris 10: Sparc, x86, x86_64 (Sun Forte 12)

  Remarks:

  • Some Sage developers are willing to help you port to OS X, Solaris and Windows. But this is no guarantee and you or your project are expected to do the heavy lifting and also support those ports upstream if there is no Sage developer who is willing to share the burden.

  Potential future ports include FreeBSD (x86, x86_64), OpenBSD (x86, x86_64), HPUX (Itanium), AIX (PPC64), and ARM (OS X).

• Quality. The code should be “better” than any other available code (that passes the two above criteria), and the authors need to justify this. The comparison should be made to both Python and other software. Criteria in passing the quality test include:

  • Speed
  • Documentation
  • Usability
  • Memory leaks
  • Maintainable
  • Reasonable build time, size, dependencies

• Refereeing. The code must be refereed, as discussed in The Sage Trac Server: Submitting Patches and Packages.