Re: does Debian help detect gravitational waves?
Yaroslav Halchenko <debian@onerussian.com> writes:
> So I guess Debian was of some notable help, and I am really glad that our work
> at least tiny bit contributed to this event. But that is it. Somewhat
> twisting while overall agreeing with the point of Aurelien's reply --
> Debian was probably used somewhere along the way of any recent sizeable
> research endeavor simply because it is used in so many scenarios and places.
In the past I had a bit contact to LIGO people -- BTW, the healpy
package has a LIGO employee as uploader -- in order to convince them to
contribute to Debian Astro.
There are some problems why Debian is not soo widely used in the science
analysis (yet): One is that due to our long freeze many important
packages are already outdated when the stable release comes out. This
may be solved by backporting -- however I still never did that and I am
afraid that I will not have the time to do it on the long run. So, if
anyone wants to volunteer backporting some important astronomy (or
science) packages, go ahead. This will increase our impact in that area.
The other problems are not so simple to solve: licensing (not everything
is DFSG compatible), poor software quality, local patches to standard
packages.
However, if we could take the gravitational waves to boost our efforts
in science: that would be great!
Cheers
Ole
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