On Thursday 01 February 2007 11:38:46 Tim Cutts wrote: > On 1 Feb 2007, at 1:00 am, Charles Plessy wrote: > > I am very interested to hear that Sanger is using Debian on > > thousands of > > machines. Do not hesitate to tell us a bit more on > > debian-med@lists.debian.org. Bioinformatics is part of our effort > > as we > > include it in "pre-clinical research", and we would love to see our > > priorities a bit more user-driven. Have you installed the popularity-contest package? > Generally, we are not using Debian packaging techniques for > bioinformatics software. The software requirements of the users move > too quickly, so packaged versions are always out of date, and > besides, different users often require different versions, so we just > leave the maintenance of such software packages to the users > themselves, and store them on a central BlueArc NFS server. > That's not to say that your packaging efforts are not valuable; I > think they're extremely valuable, and will help small laboratories > and the like build functional bioinformatics systems very quickly > without requiring large amounts of assistance from dedicated support > staff they probably can't afford. Thank you for your insights, Tim. There is probably no point for Debian to compete in the package versions with upstream developers of BioPerl, Wise, EMBOSS and whatever other tools yours and your neighbouring institutes' are providing :o) A main difference of Debian to other Linux distributions is probably the merger of "us" and "you/them", "ours" and "yours/theirs". I am very confident that you will find sponsors external to the Sanger Center of even within who would help in getting your changes into the main distribution. It should be only a few days between submission and its appearance in unstable. Please contact Debian-Med whenever you feel that some action from the side of the Debian commuity could possibly be beneficial for your cause. And somehow I hope that you already feel a part of the community. Best regards Steffen
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