Quick summary from BOSC/ISMB/ECCB in Stockholm
Hello,
I presented Debian-Med in a 5min lightening talk at BOSC and we received many thanks for
our efforts from many sides. Also on the site from this list was Soren, who used the
opportunity to get me into updating my gpg key
(http://ekaia.org/blog/2009/05/10/creating-new-gpgkey).
Concernign the typical Q'n'A after my short presentation, there seems to be a general
confusion about Debian-Med and its relation to Debian. People don't get that what
Debian-Med does is a part of Debian and not a separation - no matter if you explicitly
mention that - I got the question nonetheless, and also the forwarding of Debian-packages
to Ubuntu is not in everybody's mind, yet. It is in a few more now.
The EMBOSS developers (I spoke with Peter Rice) are very happy for their ties to Charles
and very much aware of him. The 15th of July will bring another version of EMBOSS, as in
every year.
The BioLib project (http://biolib.open-bio.org/wiki/Main_Page, C routines with interfaces
to the other Bio* projects) main developer, Piotr Prins, is already a Debian affectionado
and will prepare for Debian over the upcoming days/weeks. Jalview (a multiple alignment
viewer) developer Jim Procter will work towards Debian packages, too. With all the still
unseen Java packages that this would involve, this will be rather tedious, though. I had
mentioned our problems with unversioned jars being distributed with upstream sources in my
presentation. He was irritated by finding people talking about his developments on mailing
lists without contacting him about it. I stressed that working with upstream is important
to us.
Over the course of the ISMB, talked back to upstream of the SeqAn++ package (Knut Reinert)
for some last issues. And I had a quick shakehands with upstream of Ballview, Andreas, who
gave a presentation at the last day of the conference and just informed me about his new
upload being around the corner.
>From my perception it seems like there is a trend of an increased involvement of upstream
in the packaging process. And I interpret this very positively.
Among the exhibitors were BioMax (http://www.biomax.com), who said they would support
Debian (and all other Linuxes, actually) both as server and client installations. I liked
to hear that. They would not mind to appear as Debian-compatible on our web site - I
asked. We don't have a section for that, obviously. There are probably more companies
downstream to Debian who would not mind being listed as such. Would there be any
opposition towards a web page that lists the Med/Bio-related commercial Debian-supporters?
The ISMB is run by the ISCB organisation. In their internal meeting I was suggesting to
support Linux distribution as a distribution channel of bioinformatics routine operations,
as the consequence of the organisations current efforts to bring bioinformatics more into
Africa and Latin America, where there is less of the routine than there is on the northern
hemisphere. This is nothing that Debian-Med could do alone, I think. Nobody of us would
want to do all all this writing. And we are all assigned to packages, not to the interplay
of packages. But - if there is demand of such a basic bioinformatics IT backbone upon
which documentation of routine tasks could be established - then we could start thinking
about it all a bit more.
Best,
Steffen
Reply to: