I have become comfortably numb

After almost five years using gentoo I decided, about one year ago, to switch to OpenSUSE. I am a KDE user and I don't have enough time to take care of my computer as it was a pet (this was the feeling I had dealing with gentoo).

One of the lessons learned with gentoo was that, most of times, fixing build scripts is not that difficult. It takes some time and research, but configuration scripts are just scripts at the end.

If you try to compile SAGE in either OpenSUSE 11.2 or 11.3 you will get a weird bash error. This is due to the fact that bash is dynamically linked with libreadline in some modern distributions (Arch linux has this issue too). The readline configuration script for the SAGE's local readline version has an exception for OpenSUSE 11.1, and only 11.1.

You only have to go to the spkg folder where the readline spkg is. In SAGE, a spkg is only a tarball of the source directory. Untar the spkg and change the following block in the build and install script (spkg-install)

if [ -f /etc/SuSE-release ]; then
    if [ `grep 11.3 /etc/SuSE-release > /dev/null; echo $?` -eq 0 ]; then
        echo "OpenSUSE 11.3 detected"
        if [ -d /usr/include/readline/ ]; then
            echo "The development version of libreadline is installed -> copying"
            if [ `uname -p` = "x86_64" ]; then
                cp /lib64/libreadline.so.* "$SAGE_LOCAL"/lib
            else
                cp /lib/libreadline.so.* "$SAGE_LOCAL"/lib
            fi
            cp -r /usr/include/readline  "$SAGE_LOCAL"/include
            exit 0
        else
            echo "No headers found, building library."
            # # This variable is only set to "true" on openSUSE 11.1.                                     
            # OVERWRITE_READLINE="true"; export OVERWRITE_READLINE                                        
        fi
    fi
fi

Now tar the folder to get the spkg again and you are good to go.