[GAP Forum] Searching for maintainer(s) for ParGAP, else GAP 4.9 will not support MPI

[Max Horn]

Dear GAP users and package authors,

we are working hard on preparing GAP 4.9, which we hope to have ready this fall (fingers crossed). There have been many, many changes; but relevant for this mail is that there was some refactoring of the GAP kernel as well as new build system.

This also required changes to a few packages, which mostly are already released. Unfortunately, there is one package where these changes are not quite trivial, and where nobody is working on implementing these changes, and that package is ParGAP: It digs very deeply into the GAP kernel, and also the GAP build system, which was always a somewhat fragile affair. And now that both of these changed a lot, ParGAP finally became unusable with the GAP development version (it doesn't even compile).

So if we released GAP 4.9 today, ParGAP would be unusable with it, and there'd be no MPI support.

For other packages, the GAP team closely collaborated with maintainers to implement fixes if necessary. But with ParGAP, there is no active maintainer, and nobody on the GAP team actually uses ParGAP, and quite frankly, none of us is interested in it. I personally am aware of exactly one person using it (Bill Allombert).

We are therefore looking for 

 (a) people who actually use ParGAP, to gauge how much interest there is in it; and
 (b) people who would be able and willing to take over maintenance of ParGAP, to get it working with the current GAP development version and GAP 4.9.

Note that the GAP team would be happy to assist any future maintainer in adapting ParGAP. We simply do not have the resources and motivation to work on this on our own (esp. if there are few or no replies to point (a) above).

By the way: An alternative to maintaining ParGAP as a separate package would be to integrate it directly into GAP, which might simplify a few things (like tracking changes to the GAP build system). Some preliminary work on this exists and is already in the GAP master branch, and I could brief anybody interested in working on it (but I don't want to write up an explanation if nobody cares anyway).

So, to repeat: If nobody steps up, I am afraid GAP 4.8.x will for now be the last GAP release series to support ParGAP or MPI in any form. We'd then likely drop it from distribution. too. So if you need ParGAP, please consider helping out with maintaining it.


Best regards,
Max
-- 
Prof. Dr. Max Horn
AG Algebra
Mathematisches Institut
Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
Arndtstraße 2
D-35392 Gießen
Tel: (+49) 641 99-32044
Fax: (+49) 641 99-32049
E-Mail: max.horn at math.uni-giessen.de