Re: FW: [dberkes@sbcglobal.net: Reporter has questions regarding Debian-Med]
On Sat, 22 Jun 2002, Dan Berkes wrote:
[I just CC this mail to the Debian-Med mailing list to let people know and
hoping for further comments.]
> 1. When did the Debian-Med project start,
The idea was born last year on the Libre Software Meeting in
Bordeaux. I announced the project officially at 7th January 2002.
> how many
> people are contributing to the project at this time,
Currently I'm the only contributor of med-* meta packages and caring
for organisation and web pages. But you can not separate Debian-Med
from Debian as a whole. There are many packages which are related to
medicine contained in Debian which are just collected and organized
by Debian-Med. So there are other Debian maintainers which contribute
to Debian-Med by just doing their normal packaging work. In fact this
is the trick why Debian-Med is builded *inside* Debian to avoid doubling
of work.
This is explained in my talk which is available at
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/News/2002/20020607.en.html
or nicely formatted at
http://people.debian.org/~tille/debian-med/talks/ltk_2002/html/
So there is contribution from other Debian maintainers but also from upstream
maintainers of medical software who are interested in getting their software
packaged for Debian. Both parties communicate over the debian-med mailing
list to coordinate their work.
> and what is the current status of the project (how far
> until an official release, if that's the applicable
> term)?
I consider the project to be in the starting phase. I'm currently bussy
coding some kind of infrastructure for a menu system to enhance the usability.
This will be also usable for Debian-Junior and possible other Debian internal
projects. (Quite the same situation for Debian-Junior: Ben Armstrong is
the main person there who is coordinating the work of Debian maintainers
and upstream authors.)
Currently we do not plan a separate release from the official Debian
distribution. I hope that we will have the first usable Debian-Med
with the successor of the upcoming Debian 3.0 = Woody. But there would be
no problem if someone (me, you, some other distributor) decides to make
a separate release at any state. Debian is free. You can do everything
which is compatible to the The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG)
which is available at
http://www.debian.org/social_contract.en.html
Perhaps we will do some live CD based on Knoppix or something else but
I think this will not be before the first Debian-Med inside the official
Debian.
> 2. What special needs do the healthcare and medical
> research industries have that you hope to provide via
> Debian-Med?
The intention is to support all fields who want to use free software.
If we find free software we try to get it included into Debian-Med.
Just read
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/index.en.html#projects
I included all fields into this list from which I've got any request from
peoplee all over the world. I had never imagined that there would be an
interest from people in for instance parmacy or physiotherapy when I started
the project - but people asked for it explicitely. If there is free
software in those fields available we can include it. But we do not have
the man power to develop from scratch. Debian-Med is intended to package
available free software and organise smooth system integration - not
development of specific software.
> 3. There are other Open Source medical projects
> (GNU-Med, for one) available. How does (or how will)
> Debian-Med complement these other projects?
GNU-Med is one of our important targets and the GNU-Med authors are really
happy thet there will be a distribution which will care for their software.
We really do not compete with any software project - the aim is integration.
Just read the slides of the talk I mentioned above. Moreover we try to
get authors of different software come together.
> 4. Regarding all of Linux, where would you say the
> medical community is in terms of adopting the
> operating system and Open Source software in general?
> Are they still in the phase of early adoption, or has
> it progressed beyond that?
The state of adoption may vary from field to field. I think in the field
of microbiology it is quite advanced and as a result of this we just have a
big number of packages of this field just integrated in Debian. Personally
I see the reason for this in the fact that this development is mostly done
at universities. In the other fields we are in early adoption. Often
I was asked by interested general practitioners who are not satisfied with
their commercial software and I think once GNU-Med is evolving (and integrated
into Debian-Med) we can give those people a great tool. Currently I would
not suggest to use it in production because it is not stable enough and there
are issues to resolve. Situation might change in one year.
> 5. That's all the questions I have (I said this would
> be painless :)).
Thanks for your interest in Debian-Med. We need some popularity to just
attract people who work together.
> Of course, I'm hoping there are
> things you might want to say about Debian-Med and
> Linux in medicine that I haven't asked?
I would like to ask you to read the available documentation carefully.
My talk could be the best thing to start but the canonical site to read
is
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/
and I hope you will include this link into your report. I would like to
ask you to check wether any important information is missing on these pages
just to make them more complete.
Perhaps we need some kind of task list for interested people:
Target for people with technical skills:
- caring for the overal Debian-Med structure (med-* meta packages)
- packaging medical software
- support upstream authors of medical software in coding
Target for people with medical skills:
- defining need for medical fields like this is done in
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/resmed-doc.html
(This is important: If we know the need as detailed as possible
we can try to fit them!)
- check the available documentation for missing or wrong things
Target for others:
- documentation and translation
- browsing the web and let us know what we should include
> Thanks for your time!
Thanks for your interest again and hoping for a good collaboration
Andreas Tille.
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