polymake: Computations with polyhedra, fans, simplicial complexes, matroids, graphs, tropical hypersurfaces

Description

polymake is open source software for research in polyhedral geometry. It deals with polytopes, polyhedra and fans as well as simplicial complexes, matroids, graphs, tropical hypersurfaces, and other objects. Supported platforms include various flavors of Linux, Free BSD and Mac OS.

License

  • GPL v3

Upstream Contact

Dependencies

Polymake needs a working installation of Perl, including its shared library and some modules (XML::Writer XML::LibXML XML::LibXSLT Term::ReadLine::Gnu JSON SVG). The Polymake interface in Sage additionally needs File::Slurp. For full functionality including polymake’s polyDB, also the Perl module MongoDB is needed.

These are not provided by a Sage package. The script package perl_cpan_polymake_prereq will signal an error at build time if the required prerequisites are not met.

The configure script will inform you about the equivalent system packages that you should install. Otherwise, you can use CPAN (see below).

Sage might install the Term::ReadLine::Gnu module, however, when you install polymake, if it is not provided by the system, or if Sage installs its own readline library.

A distribution-independent way to install Perl modules (into a user’s home directory or /usr/local) is using CPAN. This is also the way to install the modules on macOS. For this, if you don’t have root access, you will need the local::lib Perl module installed:

cpan -i XML::Writer XML::LibXML XML::LibXSLT File::Slurp Term::ReadLine::Gnu JSON SVG MongoDB

Several Sage packages should be installed before installing the polymake package to give a more featureful Polymake installation:

sage -i 4ti2 latte_int topcom qhull

Software that would need to be installed manually (no Sage package available) for a more featureful Polymake installation: azove, porta, vinci, SplitsTree4.

Information on missing Polymake prerequisites after installing polymake:

$ sage -sh
(sage-sh) $ polymake
polytope> show_unconfigured;

It is strongly recommended to also install JuPyMake:

sage -i jupymake

When JuPyMake is present, Sage is able to use a more robust interface to Polymake.

Debugging polymake install problems

# apt-get install libdevel-trace-perl
$ cd src
$ perl -d:Trace support/configure.pl

Type

experimental

Version Information

package-version.txt:

4.4

Equivalent System Packages

opensuse:

$ sudo zypper install polymake

See https://repology.org/project/polymake/versions

However, these system packages will not be used for building Sage because spkg-configure.m4 has not been written for this package; see https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/27330