Blends and (astronomy) meta-packages
Hi,
for the debian-astro group, I maintain the "python-astropy"
package. This package is accompanied with a couple of "affiliates"
packages, some of which are already in Debian (like "astroquery"), or in
the packaging process.
In the astropy development, there recently came up the idea of a
metapackage "astropy-all" which should install all affiliated packages
[1]. There it is centered on python package managers (pypi, conda);
however it may be worth to duplicate such a package for Debian.
My question is now what would be the best effort here?
1. Create a meta-package within python-astropy: This would concentrate the
management in this package which is maybe not the best idea (development
of affiliated packages is independent of the astropy package itself).
2. Create an independent meta-package. This would be probably the
easiest way.
3. Create it as a task of a (not yet existing) "debian-astro" tasks
package.
I am asking, since there are other meta-packages to be created in a
quite similar way (like all programs from http://astromatic.net, or all
ESO data reduction pipelines): They would somehow fit into the
"debian-astro" thematics, but they are not what I would take as a real
"task" selection: there I would see more thematics like "observational
astronomy", "cosmology", "education" etc. On the other hand,
meta-packages like "python-astropy-all" or "astromatic" may be a good
start for a debian-astro blend.
The "python-astropy-all" meta-package is a however bit special, since as
a task it could be generated almost automatically by a script that
pulls the package list from upstream [2]. Also, since there is a good
infrastructure for these packages [3], chances are high to get many of
them included into Debian with only a bit of work.
So, what would be the best to proceed?
Best regards
Ole
P.S. Sorry for crossposting over three mailing lists. I had no idea where it
really fits best. I read all three, so you may restrict the answer to where
the topic really matches.
[1] https://github.com/astropy/astropy/pull/3762
[2] http://www.astropy.org/affiliated/registry.json
[3] https://github.com/astropy/package-template/blob/master/README.rst
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