sage-2.7.txt

Hello,

I've released SAGE-2.7.   Download the source here

   http://sagemath.org/sage/dist/src/

or get a binary here

   http://sagemath.org/sage/download.html

I've posted binaries for the standard platforms, but
haven't updated the vmware image yet.

This is a very significant upgrade from the previous version
of SAGE, primarily because:

 1. The *SAGE notebook* was almost completely rewritten.

 2. SAGE now includes a wide range of functionality
    for *numerical* computation and applied mathematics;
    in particular, SAGE includes both scipy for scientific
    computation and cvxopt for optimization standard.

 3. Building SAGE now involves *Fortran*.  On most systems
    a gfortran binary is downloaded and installed as part
    of the build process.  There is also nontrivial support
    for using Fortran (and Fortran libraries) from SAGE and
    in the SAGE notebook, and in Python files (mainly via
    numpy, f2py, and new code by Josh Kantor).

WARNING: Because of (2), building and upgrading SAGE is
unfortunately now more difficult rather.  In fact, I
expect there to be upgrade and build issues with
SAGE-2.7 -- making scipy buid on "most anything" is
not easy.  That said, SAGE now has functionality for
addressing a huge range of mathematics, certainly
far more than any other free mathematics software.

Please try this out and let me know about the show-stopper
bugs/issues, and send me updated patches, so I can release
sage-2.7.1 early next week.  After that, the plan is to
incorporate all of Didier Deshomme and Brian Granger's great
packaging work into SAGE, and work toward having .deb's,
etc.

The main highlights of the release include though following,
though I've likely missed many people's contributions (which
are listed in the detailed changelog).    As usual, there are
still many patches in my inbox that I still haven't got into a
stable enough form to include yet.  Resending me your
not-included patches as patches against sage-2.7 would be
appreciated.

       * m albrecht: a huge patch of fast multivariate
             poly arithmetic code, etc.
       * r bradshaw: enhancements to sagex; merge with
             official pyrex.
       * d harvey: generic convolution function
       * d joyner (refereed by n alexander): large
             permutation group improvements patch.
       * j kantor: excellent fortran support (e.g., %fortran
             in the notebook)
       * j kantor and w stein: new standard SAGE packages --
              blas: fortran low level linear algebra
              cvxopt: convex optimization, linear programming,
                      sparse linear algebra
              f2c: fortran to c conversion program
              gfortran: binaries
              lapack: fortran high-level linear algebra library
              scipy: latest svn version
       * r miller, e kirkman, t boothby: substantial bug
              fixes and improvements to graph theory code.
       * w stein: upgrade to latest svn version of scipy
              (much easier to build, etc.)
       * w stein with b moretti, y qiang, a clemesha,
              d ramier, t clemans, and t boothby:
              rewrite of the SAGE notebook; use twisted;
              more robust security model, etc.
       * w stein: removed Mark Watkins's "ec" from SAGE.
       * w stein: upgraded to mercurial-0.9.4
       * w stein: included sympy-0.4.2 standard with
                  SAGE (do "import sympy")
       * g tornaria: improvements to the SAGE base
                  coercion code and free modules
       * c wuthrich: p-adic BSD bounds

Many many other people contributed to this release.

 -- William Stein, 2007-07-19