Hello folks,

Sage 2.8.13 has been released. Sources are and binaries should soon be
available at

              http://sagemath.org/download.html

This is the first release after the excellent Sage Days 6 in Bristol.
We are a couple days late, mostly due to a rocky initial alpha0 that
took some time to sort out and also the new policy that all patches
have to be reviewed before they can get merged.

The usual suspects contributed major pieces to this release:

 - Bill Hart
 - John Cremona
 - Josh Kantor
 - Martin Albrecht
 - Michael Abshoff
 - Mike Hansen
 - Ondrej Certik
 - Ralf-Philip Weinmann
 - Robert Bradshaw
 - William Stein
 - Willem Jan Palenstijn

Sorry if I forgot anybody, it has been quite a turbulent release
cycle. Thanks to all the reviewers, all the testers, especially
Jaap Spies, and please send me patches for the doctest failures.

Cheers,

Michael Abshoff (release chair), William Stein

* Major Features, New Spkgs and Bugfixes

Major new features are John Cremona's g0n, updates to flint, scipy &
numpy, cvxopt and sympy as well as major bug fixes to libfplll and
memory leak fixes in linbox. This is also the first release that
compiles on OSX 10.5 "out of the box", i.e. without the need to have
gfortran installed.

Updates spkgs in detail:

#563: linbox-20070915.p2.spkg (Michael Abshoff)
#1029: flint-0.9-r1072.spkg (Robert Bradshaw, Michael Abshoff)
#1188: libfplll-2.1.3-20071117.spkg (Martin Albrecht, Michael Abshoff,
      Willem Jan Palenstijn, also #1126)
#1177: mpfr-2.3.0.p0.spkg (Michael Abshoff)
#1189: sympy-0.5.7.spkg (Ondrej Certik)
#1197: cremona-20071116.p0.spkg (John Cremona, William Stein,
      Ralf-Philip Weinmann)
#1198: scipy-20071020-0.6.spkg (Josh Kantor)
#1198: numpy-20071020-1.0.3.1.spkg (Josh Kantor)
#1199: cvxopt-0.9.p1.spkg (Josh Kantor, Michael Abshoff, also #1121, #1161)

We closed a total of 49 tickets, see

 http://www.sagetrac.org/sage_trac/query?status=closed&milestone=sage-2.8.13

for details.

* Known Issues with 2.8.13

 - cvxopt fails to import on OSX PPC (ticket #1222)
 - g0n, i.e. cremona.spkg fails to compile on Linux/Itanium with
  older gcc and also Solaris.

* Upcoming Releases

2.8.14 is planned for next week, depending on how close the release
will be to Sage Bug Day 6 on December 2nd, 2007 we might do another
2.8.15 release the day before. Major spkg candidates for 2.8.14 are

 - Singular 3-0-4
 - PolyBoRi
 - ATLAS BLAS/Lapack

It looks unlikely that we will achieve the major goals for 2.9, namely
Solaris 32 bit support and OSX 10.5 64 bit support, in the next two
weeks, so we might do a couple more 2.8.x releases.

* Coverage

2.8.13:

 Overall weighted coverage score:  34.4%
 Total number of functions:  17472

Compared to 2.8.12:

 Overall weighted coverage score:  34.3%
 Total number of functions:  17418

* About Sage (http://www.sagemath.org)

Sage is developed by volunteers and combines 71 open source packages.
It is available for free download from sagemath.org and its mirrors in
source or binary form. If you have any questions and/or problems
please report them to the google groups sage-devel, sage-support, sage-
forum or sage-newbie. You can also drop by in #sage-devel in freenode.