Sage 2.10.4 coming up

We are very close to a Sage 2.10.4 release. I didn't announce the 2.10.3 release here, but Marshall Hampton did. My reduced blogging activities were are mix of procrastination, the need for some time away from the computer and Sage Days 8 in Austin, TX. Sage Days 8 was very nice and I had a lot of fun in Austin, but more about that in a later post.

So I am being lazy now and I will more or less copy and paste the announcement from the release notes:

• Memory leaks exposed by modular symbols: Michael Abshoff, Martin Albrecht, Burcin Erocal, Willem Jan Palenstijn, Clement Pernet, William Stein: memory leaks exposed by modular symbols functionality. This ticket is a composite of numerous other memleak fixes merged over a 7 month period. Modular forms are an excellent way to expose memory leaks in pretty much every algebraic component of Sage and all known issues there are now finally fixed.
• SQLAlchemy and DSage: We merged SetupTools and SQLAlchemy into Sage as standard packages. SQLAlchemy is now used as in DSage replacing hand written code with much more efficient classes from SQLAlchemy. SetupTools is required to install SQLAlchemy, but is also useful for a number of optional spkgs like MayaVI and packages from the Enthought Tools. Yi Qiang improved DSage making it more robust and finally adding the documentation to the standard Sage manual.
  
• Graph theory: chromatic polynomial: An algorithm originally written in C by Gordon Royle has been adapted by Robert Miller to replace the old slow method. This algorithm uses a cut and merge algorithm to recursively compute the chromatic polynomial, and is written in Cython.
• Documentation: Many doctest patches written during Doc Day 2 were merged. In addition many people kept up the good work after Doc Day 2 was over and have been submitting patches to increase coverage. We did exceed the target for the release by 0.6% reaching 47.6%.
• Symmetric function updates: Mike Hansen, reviewed by Franco Saliola: Sage 2.10.4 adds support for Macdonald polynomials, LLT polynomials, and Jack polynomials as well as a whole class of user-defined symmetric functions which can characterized by orthogonality and triangularity conditions. Support for working with ribbon tableaux was also added as part of these updates. In addtition, many doctests were added and subtle bugs fixed.
• Notebook Updates Tom Boothby, William Stein and Timothy Clemans: Fixed a bunch of new and old issue that improve the usability of the notebook. Among those are a working trash, fixes to the polling infrastructure, saving the content of unevaluated cells, URL issues to work around problems introduced by restrictive firewalls and small improvements to the interact command.
• Parallel Doctesting: Gary Furnish reviewed by Michael Abshoff: "sage -tp" has been introduced as an experimental multithreaded doctester. The first parameter is the number of threads, and the second parameter is the folder to doctest. Thus "sage -tp 4 devel/sage/sage" tests everything with four threads running. Additional options like "-long" or valgrind options like "-memcheck" do work. The code base is still young and needs more testing. The eventual goal will be to replace the current doctesting infrastructure with this code base.

Sage 2.10.4.final has been released and is currently being build tested on our compiler farm. Once it has passed tests and no blocker issue shows up in testing we will release.