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The short answer: someone has to implement this. Some components of Sage are already handled like this, but not all.

A longer answer: you should check in the top-level "config.log" file to see why it is not recognizing your system installation of giac, because that one should work. There is a relevant ./configure option:

--with-system-giac={no|yes (default)|force (exit with an error if no usable version is found)}

The relevant code is located (in the source code) in build/pkgs/giac/, and in particular in build/pkgs/giac/spkg-configure.m4. See also build/pkgs/giac/distros/ for the names of packages that provide giac for various packaging systems.

maxima doesn't have an spkg-configure.m4 file, and so there is no corresponding test to see if it's already installed. There is work toward implementing it at https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/32867.

The short answer: someone has to implement this. Some components of Sage are already handled like this, but not all.

A longer answer: you should check in the top-level "config.log" file to see why it is not recognizing your system installation of giac, because that one should work. it is supposed to be detected. There is a relevant ./configure option:

--with-system-giac={no|yes (default)|force (exit with an error if no usable version is found)}

The relevant code is located (in the source code) in build/pkgs/giac/, and in particular in build/pkgs/giac/spkg-configure.m4. See also build/pkgs/giac/distros/ for the names of packages that provide giac for various packaging systems.

maxima doesn't have an spkg-configure.m4 file, and so there is no corresponding test to see if it's already installed. There is work toward implementing it at https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/32867.