Report from Libre Software Meeting

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

Hi,

last week I attended the Libre Software Meeting in Amiens.  The most
interesting topics for myself were the the scientific and the medical
track.  I had three talks which are available at the usual place at

    http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/

Regarding Debian-Med imaging I learned two lessons:

  1. cimg-dev is definitely something we want in med-imaging-dev.
     Perhaps we also want gimp in the suggests of med-imaging or
     rather I will ask the maintainer of gimp-plugin-registry to
     build a separate package of the command line tool greycstoration
     that uses the cimg library.
       LSM-talk at:  http://www.rmll.info/article222.html
       (Hint: There should ba an English description but the web page
              is broken)
     Just see
        http://cimg.sourceforge.net/

  2. There are thre interesting free programs for radiology imaging:
     Osirix (unfortunately runs only on Mac, any porters???), xmedcon
     (which we have) and amide (http://amide.sourceforge.net/) which
     we perhaps should have.
       LSM-talk at:  http://www.rmll.info/article437.html

     On my train journey back I started packaging amide and my trial
     is at:

       http://people.debian.org/~tille/packages/amide/

     Weak points of packaging:
       - I have no idea of scrollkeeper and I doubt that stuff I did
         here will work - at least the help in the executable does
         not come up.
       - There is a really strange packaging issue that one patch is
         not applied by dpatch.  If you are interested move
           http://people.debian.org/~tille/packages/amide/debian/patches_not_working/src_Makefile.in.diff
         to patches (and make sure you are using the original
         src/Makefile.in from the tarball because I just changed
         it manually to get rid of the -rpath linking).  So this
         is kind of a puzzle homework for people interested in
         packaging.
       - There seem to be two needed (suggested?) libraries missing
         in Debian z_matrix_70/libecat and volpack/libvolpack (see
         README).  Some investigation should be done regards
           a) How useful amide works without these libs.
           b) In how far we could need these libs in Debian-Med
              in general.
       - The package needs (suggests) libfame which is currently
         available at debian-multimedia.org but not on official
         Debian mirror.  Some investigations have to be done in
         how far this is an issue or whether libfame could be made
         official.

     I have not yet decided whether I would like to be the official
     amide maintainer.  We currently have xmedcon and thus I regard
     finishing gnumed-server packages more important and will do this
     first, but perhaps somebody wants to step in because most of the
     work of packaging seems to be done - perhaps some questions
     on debian-devel or debian-mentors will solve the

Regarding Debian-Med practice I also learned two lessons:

  1. Besides the Elexis system there is another "Swiss-made"
     Eclipse based practice management framework.  The hint was
     given in the talk
         http://www.rmll.info/article226.html
     ... but I realised that I made sloppy notes and my log
     is missing the name of this beast.  The difference between
     Elexis and the alternative system seemed to be more or less
     implementing the differences between German speaking and
     French speaking part of Swiss.  If you want to learn more
     just ask Google or the author of the talk Werner Keil
     (Creative Arts & Technologies - UK).

  2. Not at any talk but not less interesting is the fact that
     below our radar seemed to evolve an interesting practice
     management system that at minimum should be listed on our
     TODO list.  If you are able to read French language have
     a look at

        http://upsis.club.fr/MedinTux/index.html

     I have seen a short demo of Gérard DELAFOND and was impressed
     by the features this program shows and according to Gérard it
     is fully capable to manage a medical practice - at least if
     it is situated in France.  Here we come to the restriction that
     does not enable me anything to do regarding packaging: The
     documentation and code is completely written in French and
     we would need a French developer who might build Debian packages
     if we would like to include it into Debian which I would
     regard as an interesting target.  So if somebody wants
     to step in here he would be welcome.

     In any case I see a bidirectional way for cooperation:  Authors
     of other practice management systems might be able to learn
     from this project and the authors of MedinTux might be
     interested in steps that might lead to more internationalisation.
     (I hope some GNUmed people might give some input about their
     view of abstraction from medical record and country specific
     health system.)

     I would regard the Debian-Med list as a possible forum for
     a technical discussion about this.

So far for the LSM report.

Kind regards

          Andreas.


--
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