On 26/02/11 22:05, Steffen Möller wrote:
[...] When looking at how Debian is working today, then what you said above seems true. But maybe we generate ideas how to keep something separate and nonetheless announce it a bit more and/or make installation. For all reading this who might not have looked at it, yet: http://debian-multimedia.org/ is fantastic. Maybe we even get Tony back to Debian after a look at it (just kidding). I am still annoyed that it was mouth propaganda that brought me to it and not some official Debian page.
Hi, Steffen. I already mentioned to Andreas that Ubuntu is in most repects Debian.The Debian and Ubuntu communities do, in fact, work together towards common objectives. However, I created 'biobuntu' based on Ubuntu 6.06 and deb's from NEBC's Debian Sarge-based Bio-Linux4 because the user experience with Ubuntu, even at 6.06, was so much better than Debian.
Tim has done a great job with the Ubuntu Lucid-based Bio-Linux6, but it would not be a good user experience at all running it under Debian with Iceweasel instead of Firefox, for example, and lots of non-free things missing. These things do matter, even though we all know that the two Linux platforms are almost identical underneath the GUI...
The vast majority of biologists use M$ Windows on their desktop, and don't care about the server. However, to encourage biologists to use Linux on the desktop as, presumably Debian-Med wants to, the user experience needs to be at least as good as M$ Windows and preferably better. I've just tried Debian 6 - It really is NOT better than M$.
This thread is a total turn-off for me about Debian-Med. Even though you were joking about me going back to Debian, I can tell you that I never will because in trying to win hearts and minds of ordinary users Debian has already lost the fight. This sort of internecine conflict between two very similar Linux distributions is pointless.
It is what Debian and Ubuntu have in common that attracted me to Debian-Med. The people here have been very helpful indeed, but the Debian politics I've witnessed recently are a wake-up call to me. What is the big deal about the fact that we set up two Bioconductor repo's?
I'm glad that I've had the opportunity to understand why Bioconductor can't simply be added to Debian-Med for the reasons that Andreas has explained. I'm new to all this and it wasn't obvious to me at the outset that it would be a problem, but cherry-picking a few popular Bioconductor packages for inclusion in Debian-Med is a futile exercise.
What I would like to see us do is make a big effort to get cran2deb working with all of Bioconductor on our two prototype repositories, with less concern about the licences. Bioconductor is, after all, freely available. In the first instance, I want to make a stable Bioconductor available to users of Bio-Linux6 (64-bit Ubuntu 10.04).
If it's not appropriate to discuss that here, let's discuss getting cran2deb working properly with all Bioconductor licences elsewhere.
Bye, Tony.