FriCAS

[riccardo.guida at gmail.com]

Dear Christoph,  Peter, Sébastien and the whole Debian Common Lisp Team.

Hi,

I allow myself to directly ask you if anybody would be interested in packaging the FriCAS project [0] , see my RPR 890525 [1].

FriCAS is a powerful computer algebra system (CAS), fork of the Axiom project. Axiom was originally developed at IBM, then sold to NAG, and then released as open source in 2001. In 2007 Axiom was forked by two projects, OpenAxiom and FriCAS.

Axiom and OpenAxiom are currently packaged in Debian, FriCAS is not. Fricas is currently distributed in Gentoo's Portage [2].

Nowadays, Axiom and FriCAS have ~2 releases per year but they have different, complementary priorities: the former emphasizes documentation and literal programming, the latter fast code development (the main developer, W Hebish reports in 2016  that 30% of the code has been changed [3]). See also 2017 git-stats [4].

I think that Debian users with professional/scientific/educational interest in CAS systems would appreciate having FriCAS distributed in Debian. In general I guess that supporting the few open source antagonists of widely-spread commercial CAS like Mathematica and Maple should be a prioritary, strategic goal of Debian.

As for details: FriCAS licence is a Modified BSD [5]; the code is compiled in common lisp; the developers strongly recommend SBCL compiler [6].

I'm not a developer, just a user, so if you need more technical details I can transfer questions to the developers or let them enter the discussion.

Hope that some generous soul will accept this important task. In any case, thanks you all for your commitment in Debian and open source.

Best,
Riccardo Guida

[0]	 https://fricas.github.io/
	http://fricas.sourceforge.net/
	https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/fricas-devel
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=890525
[2]https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sci-mathematics/fricas
[3] http://www.math.uni.wroc.pl/~hebisch/other/icms.pdf
[4] https://oldk1331.github.io/fricas-gitstats/index.html
[5] http://fricas.sourceforge.net/copyright.txt
[6] https://sourceforge.net/p/fricas/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/INSTALL