Hi Ole and all, I am also interested to contribute to this paper as much as I can.Several great points have already been raised in the previous posts to this topic. For example the importance of licensing, or the great advantages that a platform like Debian can provide to the upstream developers (scientists/astronomers in our case) for developing robust software and thus science.
Besides those, I also wanted to raise the point this paper on a package manager for astronomy would be the perfect context to discuss the ever-increasing importance of software in scientific results and in particular on the reproducibility of scientific results. Using software that has been tested and released as part of a package manager, enables users to easily get older versions of those software and thus easily reproduce scientific results that were based on those older versions.
In this context, the fact that Debian encourages reproducible binaries (reproducible-builds.org) is also very useful for reproducible results.
Therefore, archiving software source files and binaries (that Debian does) is another great advantage of Debian-Astro which I think would be nice to discuss.
As the upstream maintainer of GNU Astronomy Utilities (links below), the experience of packaging for Debian (with your great help) and all the suggestions provided by Lintian was very fruiteful for me, so I can help in that part of the paper. I would also be happy to describe Gnuastro if the individual packages within Debian Astro are to be discussed in this paper.
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/ https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gnuastro Cheers, Mohammad On 11/23/2016 09:24 AM, Ole Streicher wrote:
Hi all, on the ADASS (Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems) conference a month ago, I presented a poster about Debian Astro [1], which is accompanied with a paper to appear in the conference proceedings. A preprint is now also available on astro-ph [2]. This brought up the idea that in the next half a year or so, we should write a refereed paper about Debian Astro, with the contributors to Debian Astro as authors. This paper should give us more popularity (especially when Stretch is out), and could be a citable reference for our efforts and give credit to the contributors of Debian Astro. Who would be willing to help me there? Best regards Ole [1] http://www.adass2016.inaf.it/images/posters/streicher.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07203v1