Bug#1019387: ITP: atomes -- an atomistic tool box

[Sébastien Le Roux <sebastien.leroux@ipcms.unistra.fr>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Sébastien Le Roux <sebastien.leroux@ipcms.unistra.fr>
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org

* Package name    : atomes
  Version         : 1.1.0
  Upstream Author : Sébastien Le Roux <sebastien.leroux@ipcms.unistra.fr>
* URL             : https://atomes.ipcms.fr/
* License         : AfferoGPLv3+
  Programming Lang: C, Fortran90, GLSL
  Description     : an atomistic tool box

Atomes is a cross-platform program developed around 3 main research
ideas: analyze, visualize, and edit/create 3D atomistic models.
Atomes offers a workspace that allows to have many projects opened simultaneously. 
The different projects in the workspace can exchange data: analysis results, atomic coordinates ...
By regrouping advanced analysis techniques, 3D visualization and 3D edition Atomes 
introduces innovative 3D rendering possibilities and intuitive utilizations of the calculation results.
Atomes also provides an advanced input preparation system 
for calculations using well known molecular dynamics codes:
  Classical MD : DL-POLY [1] and LAMMPS [2]
  ab-initio MD : CPMD [3] and CP2K [4]
  QM-MM MD : CPMD [3] and CP2K [4]
To prepare the input files for these calculations is likely to be the key, 
and most complicated step towards MD simulations. Atomes offers a user-friendly assistant 
to help and guide the user step by step to achieve this crucial step.

Among the many reasons I could think of, to help you understand why you
should consider Atomes seriously, I will pick 3: 

1) Atomes offers various physico-chemical analysis tools for 3D atomistic
models, to my knowledge there is no software packaged by Debian that
provides these kind of tools. Atomes also offers a complete graph
edition system, so that calculations results are analyzed, prepared for 
publication, within the software it-self.  
These calculations are parallelized in OpenMP. 

2) Atomes is designed to handle millions of atoms large systems, 
this is true for both the calculation and the visualization parts of the
program. I invite the reviewer of this ITP to compare Atomes
performances, to open and visualize large CIF file [5] or large PDB file [6] 
with other softwares packaged for Debian, like avogadro [7] or GChem3D [8]

3) Atomes provided several tools to build 3D atomistic models and 
design materials: advanced crystal builder, surface creation and
passivation ... these tools and are usually found only in commercial softwares,
and simply did not have counterparts in the open source community before Atomes.

For the time being I am the sole developer/maintener of Atomes, 
and I spend a significant part of my professional time to do so. 

Sources are hosted on Github:

Atomes sources:          https://github.com/Slookeur/Atomes
Atomes DEB sources:      https://github.com/Slookeur/Atomes-deb-build

Yes I am looking for a sponsor, this is my first Debian package, 
so I am actually looking for all the help I can get. 
I am willing to spend time to learn how to do things properly 
to get Atomes approved by the Debian community and ultimately packaged. 
If the proper way to do that is inside a packaging team then I think
the "Debian Scientific Computing Team" is likely to be the most
appropriate place to start.

I am looking forward to your reply and advise. 

Best regards.

Sébastien Le Roux

References:

[1]    "https://www.scd.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/DL_POLY.aspx"; 
[2]    "https://lammps.sandia.gov"; 
[3]    "http://www.cpmd.org"; 
[4]    "http://cp2k.berlios.de";
[5]    "https://www.rcsb.org/structure/3j3q";
[6]    "https://www.rcsb.org/structure/2OGM";
[7]    "https://avogadro.cc";
[8]    "https://gchemutils.nongnu.org/gchem3d.html";