Re: pari version and dates

[Bill Allombert <Bill.Allombert@math.u-bordeaux1.fr>]

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 01:57:13PM +0100, John Cremona wrote:
> Apologies for a question which is probably very silly.
> 
> One of my computers has version 2.5.4 in /usr/bin, specifically
> /usr/bin/gp-2.5,  which has a datestamp of 17 Nov 2011, and when it
> runs the banner says that it was compiled on that day (presumably by
> me as I administer this machine) and the banner ends with Copyright
> (C) 2000-2011 The PARI Group.  The version number is 2.5.4 (released).
> 
> But on http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/download.html it lists 2.5.4 as
> the most recent released version, dated May 2013.
> 
> So how come I made a released version 18 months before the release date?

My guess is that you have libpari 2.5.4 but gp 2.5.0 installed.
GP displays the version of the libpari library it use, but used to
displays the compilation of date of the GP binary. This has been fixed
in 2.6.0.

Maybe the root cause is that you have two libpari installed, and gp pick the
newer one. You can check that by doing
ldd /usr/bin/gp-2.5
there will be some line like
        libpari-gmp.so.3 => /usr/lib/libpari-gmp.so.3 (0x00007f801c789000)

Now, to your question: the GP binary from 2.5.0 is almost identical to 2.5.4
except for the text 'Copyright (C) 2000-2011' which was changed to
'Copyright (C) 2000-2013' and the instruction to subscribe to the mailing-list
(?12). So I would say you can keep it.

Cheers,
Bill.