Re: New tags for biology and medicine.
On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Steffen Moeller wrote:
To me DebTags are a way to describe
software packages. A main motivation to have these tags, if I recall
correctly, is to filter packages when presenting them to users to make them
select software for local installations.
Perfectly agreed. But you was talking about clusters and I doubt that
any user is presented the list of packages based on DebTags to install
a cluster.
Well, you mentioned that you want to do this but I have never seen giving
you any reason for this or any advantage you want to gain by using this.
The advantage is the adaption to complex workflows. I see no way that system
administrators can prepare all tools well in advance and all database and
update them all in time. No way, even for some constrained field like
biological sequence analysis.
This statement obviousely shows that you had not yet looked into FAI.
I guess Thomas Lange (FAI author) would smirk brightly if he would read
this. :)
Moreover I continuosely fail to see in how far this will be changed by
implementing deeper DebTags hierarchy.
Maybe the admins get in sync for the first
users and agree on some setup, they will not do it for the 205th. And they
should not. So if you need a tailored runtime environment for your tasks,
then you need some way to get it established dynamically. Now, every cluster
participating in a, e.g., campus grid can allow arbitrary installations or
they could be constrained differently for each cluster.
But you are describing local need of a campus that could never been
implemented in DebTags. FAI just has this kind of classification and
was build for exactly this reason.
DebTags would appear
like a very reasonable language to constrain and describe packages.
I don't think so in the sense you mentioned above but in a much more
general sense. DebTags-devel people might correct me if I'm wrong.
This has something of a hen-and-egg problem. We have this file here:
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-med/trunk/community/debtags/tags?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
which features many facets, badly lacking descriptions, still. We could come
up with an extension of that format (or it may be existing already) that also
assigns the affected packages for each term. With a certain number of
assignments we would ask for their adoption by debtags. Would this sound
reasonable?
At least I will not stop you in trying. ;-))
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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