Re: Package status in Debian-med website
On Thu, 30 Nov 2006, Charles Plessy wrote:
As Andreas said, we did not communicate on our recent work. The release
will be the prefect moment for advertising our improvements.
Definitely.
Maybe we
could write separately entries for the Debian-Med news, and use them to
write a nice summary for the Etch release ?
Sounds like a very good idea.
The above two points are direct TODOs for the Etch+1 debian-med. If you
like the idea, I propose that we set release goals for the next cycle.
So for the moment, we would have :
* Keep in sync the metapackages and the web site.
* Communicate more regularly to our usres.
This spontaneousely rises the idea in my that we could write a monthly
Debian-Med report every 1. (+x) of the next month. So what about a mail
to the Debian-Med list for tomorrow:
Monthly report 11/2006
* Debian-Med team decided to issue monthly reports
* Debian-Med 0.12 hit testing. This will be probably (correct
me if you disagree - I'm open for changing my mind) the
Etch-Release version
* Andreas Tille started to work on a dbconfig-common based
GNUmed-server package
* Discussing release goals for Etch+1
* what else
I think a monthly frequency of reports is apropriate for the
current speed in our project. But this will show people that
we are continuosely working and will push us a little bit to
keep on the work.
The second point is not really technical, but the first point has been
discussed a few times in the past. I had a quick look as the sources of
the metapackage, and it should not be too difficult to write a webpage
generator from them.
IMHO this should be done in the CDD framework and yes, I agree it
should be not that hard - but simply has to be done.
I think that it would be a very useful tool, which
we could expand.
I'm in bug favour of this. Perhaps we would catch other CDDs to
uses the CDD framework for Etch+1. (I just put Debian-Edu in CC
for reasons people who are reading this list should know. ;-)
For instance, we could also generate
developper-oriented pages which allow to track upstream versions and
check the number of installations. Here is an example, made by hand. The
gool would be to autogenerate such pages.
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMedBio (see the popularity and technical
summary links)
Ahh, this is *really* great and will definitely catch the Debian-Edu
people who are very keen on popularity contest. ;-)
This made me realise that most packages here have no watch file. We
could add a third release goal:
* Submit a working watch file to Debian-Med packages whenever possible.
While I agree that every package should have watch files (not only
those who are Debian-Med related) I faced the problem that especially
our target software makes it hard to write watch files. I maintain
some packages where I'm unable to convince the authors (if they are
even reachable by mail) to use a consistent version scheme and a
convenient release management. So sometimes we are just biten by
the authors who prevent us from writing reasonable watch files.
As you see, these release goals are not very time-consuming. They should
not stop us from broadening our coverage of the free medical and
biological packages.
Right. Many thanks to you Charles for keeping up the very good Debian-Med
work over the last year where I was more or less occupied by real life
work. It was great to see Debian-Med continuously evolving even when
I was leaning back a little bit end left the work to others.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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