Avoid errors due to too large range bounds

[ThomasBreuer]

resolves #6200

Hopefully this is just a preliminary fix.
The change can be reverted as soon as large integers are allowed as bounds and length of ranges in GAP.

[ThomasBreuer]

One CI test job is failing, "Validate release scripts".
As far as I understand, the code formatting in some python scripts is not acceptable, and "proper code formatting" is required for the test to pass.

How is this related to the current pull request?

Is this problem something that should be addressed in the current pull request, or is this a separate issue that should be fixed first, and then we run the CI tests again?

[ChrisJefferson]

Yes, I'm not sure how that Python code got merged in, but it's obviously nothing to do with your PR.

[ChrisJefferson]

I'm not saying we shouldn't merge this, but I made another PR adding 'large ranges' to GAP ( #6202 ), which also seems to fix this problem. Of course, we might decide that's too big a change.

[ThomasBreuer]

@ChrisJefferson thanks.
As I wrote above, this pull request was intended as a hopefully preliminary solution (and can be used for a quick patch).
I would prefer to provide your "big ranges", provided that they do not affect the performance of the "small ranges",
but I leave the decision to the GAP kernel experts.

[ChrisJefferson]

I'm really not sure why your PR is failing, because it looks fine to me when I run 'black' on the python files on my computer. Let's see if anyone else has a suggestion.

[ThomasBreuer]

@ChrisJefferson Concerning the formatting problem: Your pull request #6202 shows the same failure.

[fingolfin]

Ignore the formatting failures. My guess is: black (the Python code formatter we use) allows itself some "breaking" changes once each year; users have a choice of pining black to a specific "edition" / year, which we don't. So my guess is that the 2026 edition changes something.

Anyway: you don't need to worry about this.

Regarding large ranges: I don't think we'll have them soon, so we definitely don't want to wait for that, and need a workaround first.

[ThomasBreuer]

Regarding large ranges: I don't think we'll have them soon, so we definitely don't want to wait for that, and need a workaround first.

So this pull request should be rebased (as soon as #6204 is merged), merged, and backported?

[fingolfin]

Yes (although the rebase was not necessary, just closing&reopening would have sufficed) :-)