Unable to build sage with Python 2

edit

Which OS ? which sage version ? which environment variables ? pointer to the whole log ?

Linux federa 28. The only environment variables I set are SAGE_CHECK and MAKE. I will have put the log file on pastebin.

To skip testing for ppl, set SAGE_CHECK_PACKAGES='!python2,!python3,!ppl'. (The Python 2 and Python 3 packages are known to fail their tests.) It is worth knowing which packages build (should be all of them), which pass their test suites (looks like ppl fails on your system, and it would also be good to know the version of gcc on your machine), and whether Sage's doctests pass (run make ptestlong to run them all).

@John Palmierigcc (GCC) 8.1.1 20180502 (Red Hat 8.1.1-1). I read on the github page that python test suite is already disabled, quote:

"Python's test suite has been disabled by default, because it causes failures on most systems. To renable the Python testsuite, set the environment variable SAGE_CHECK_PACKAGES to "python"

• What do I have to do before running make again?
• And should i run make ptestlong before running make -j5 or after it?
• PPL is for numerical optimisation, is it not a bad idea to skip tests for it?
• What's the difference between make ptest and make ptestlong? Doesn't the latter test external dependencies like maple etc

You should be able to run make again and it should pick up where it left off. make ptestlong first builds Sage (if necessary) and then runs its tests, so you can do that (actually make -j5 ptestlong) instead of make -j5.

Using SAGE_CHECK=yes at all is optional; the hope is that Sage's use of each component package is tested in Sage's own test suite. In the case of ppl, it looks like some compiler incompatibility: gcc 8 is pretty new. So such a test failure is not necessarily a catastrophe.

You run the basic tests with make ptest; some other tests take a longer time to run, and they are only run with make ptestlong. Neither one tests optional external packages like maple unless you explicitly ask them too.

To add to my first bullet point, shouldn't you run make distclean before running make again or make -j5 ptestlong especially when a build fails?

If the build fails because of the value of SAGE_CHECK, for example, there is no need to do make distclean: that will only delete parts which successfully built. (If a component fails to build, it should not get installed, and it should therefore not pollute the build.) So you should just be able to run make again, after modifying SAGE_CHECK or other relevant variables.

Well, make -j5 ptestlong didn't work, it caused an error unless I ran make distclean first and now make -j5 ptestlong is saying I don't have a maths library.

Edit: Your method would have worked (The clue why it didn't work is below.)

checking whether make -j5 ptestlong sets $(MAKE)... no
checking whether make -j5 ptestlong supports nested variables... no

I was setting the environment variable export MAKE="make -j5 ptestlong" thinking that by running make it would execute this command. I was wrong because the message above shows that it doesn't set make. This works only when the ptestlong command is excluded which raises the suspicion that MAKE takes only one command. The way to do it is to run the command make -j5 ptestlong directly in the command line.

The standard thing to do is export MAKE="make -j5" and then run make ptestlong.

Yes that's how I should have done it. make -j5 ptestlong has been running for nearly 5 hours now. Its been stuck on the part below for almost an hour now:

[dochtml] [thematic_] dumping object inventory... done
[dochtml] [thematic_] build succeeded.
[dochtml] [thematic_] The HTML pages are in ../inst/share/doc/sage/html/en/thematic_tutorials.
[dochtml] Build finished. The built documents can be found in /home/user/sagemath/inst/share/doc/sage/html/en/thematic_tutorials
[dochtml] Elapsed time: 1729.2 seconds.
[dochtml] Done building the documentation!

There is no prompt but the cursor is still blinking. My system still sounds like its on full throttle and ps -ef | grep -i make shows that this process is still running. Is this normal or is something wrong?

Something is wrong.

@John Palmieri I managed to get it working. I had to run make ptest and all tests passed successfully, something must have been wrong with make ptest long. Now I can start using sage for math. I want to add sage to my PATH so I can run it from anywhere. Initially I wanted to add $HOME/sage/inst/bin to my PATH but this directory contains executables and symbolic links for a lot of programs such as python 2 and python 3. Would doing this cause conflicts with my system installed python? If so then is adding the SAGE_ROOT directory i.e. $HOME/sage/src/sage a better option?

Note that it should be make ptestlong, not make ptest long. Anyway, adding SAGE_ROOT to your path is the better option than adding the bin directory to your path. Or you can create a symbolic link pointing to the script SAGE_ROOT/sage. (That's what I do: /usr/local/bin/sage is a symlink pointing to SAGE_ROOT/sage.)

Yes I decided not to go my usual way of adding bin to PATH. The symbolic link is actually very convenient and I will use it a lot more from now on. And thanks for enlightening me on sage and the installation process.