[GAP Forum] GAP package: braid

[Sergey Shpectorov]

I am one of the authors of braid and mapclass, but I cannot answer why 
sage tries to load braid. In 2012 there was some talk about porting braid 
to sage and I believe that perhaps David Joyner wanted it ported. At least 
his name was mentioned in the correspondence. Dima Pasechnik also played 
some role. Dima, do you remember anything?

Sergey
________________________________________
From: forum-bounces at gap-system.org [forum-bounces at gap-system.org] on behalf of Alexander Konovalov [alexander.konovalov at st-andrews.ac.uk]
Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2017 8:19 PM
To: Max Horn
Cc: z060822400814a at rezozer.net; GAP Forum
Subject: Re: [GAP Forum] GAP package: braid

> On 14 Jan 2017, at 20:10, Max Horn <max at quendi.de> wrote:
>
> Dear Jerome,
>
> for some reason I only received your email yesterday -- presumably it was stuck in mailing list moderation? Anyway, better a late answer than non at all :-).

Yes - I've looked at moderating requests yesterday and discovered it there.
>
>> On 07 Dec 2016, at 16:57, Jerome BENOIT <z060822400814a at rezozer.net> wrote:
>>
>> Hello Forum,
>>
>> I have just noticed that Sage[Math] tries to pre-loads the GAP package `braid',
>> which is not present in the GAP webpage. I guess it is an old GAP package.
>> Can anybody confirm this ? Does anybody knows whether or not this GAP pachage
>> has been replaced/supersedeed ?
>
> To the best of my knowledge, GAP never bundled a "braid" package. There is an undeposited "package" with that name, see <https://www.gap-system.org/Packages/undep.html>, but (a) that never was shipped together with GAP,

Yes, that's true.

In addition, the MapClass package (https://www.gap-system.org/Packages/mapclass.html)
redistributed with GAP says that it is "an extension of the Braid package for GAP"
but it does not require Braid to work.

> and (b) as far as I can tell, it is just a bunch of GAP source files, not an actual GAP package (i.e. no PackageInfo.g, init.g, read.g etc.).  Well, that said, there is also a broken link which purports to contain a "proper" package, but it points to a location on www.opensourcemath.org, and that domain expired and was taken over by a domain grabber placing ads on it.
>
> Anyway, if you want to find out why Sage tries to load that package, perhaps ask them? And/or query their version control system to see when (and by whom) the code to load the package was added.

Perhaps authors of Braid and MapClass, if they read the Forum, could give more light too.

HTH
Alexander



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