Re: Looking for a Debian packager for FIS-GT.M : Change the History of Healthcare !!
Hi Luis,
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 09:37:10PM -0500, Luis Ibanez wrote:
> We are looking for one of you to help
> us change the history of Healthcare
Hmmm, I'm afraid we can not change the history but we can try to take
some influence at least onto the future. (At least I lost my time
travelling device and I do not remember when.) :-)
> VistA is the best proven EHR, and it has been used for the last 30 years
> at the VA. It currently runs about 170 VA hospitals and about 1,000
> ambulatory facilities.
>
> http://www.va.gov/vista_monograph/
We in the Debian Med team are well avare of the role VistA is playing in
Free medical Software - no real need to do further advertising.
> The Open Source implementation of M/MUMPS that can
> be used in Linux is FIS-GT.M:
>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/fis-gtm/
>
> but it currently doesn't have a Debian package for it...
That's right and we should definitely work on it. I can confirm
that we even started to work on it at
svn://svn.debian.org/svn/debian-med/trunk/packages/fis-gtm
However the work is complex and needs manpower. If you would like to
dive a bit into Debian packaging where we are happy to guide you
patiently into I'm quite positive that we can finally succeede. You
might like to try Google for
site:lists.debian.org/debian-med fis gtm
and you can get some kind of discussion status. BTW, you contacted the
Debian Med developer list which is fine. However, the discussion
regarding VistA and fis-gtm happened on our general list[1] and it seems
reasonable to keep the discussion there until we finally come to the
very technical bits. I'd suggest you subscribe this list to learn a
bit more about Debian Med and to make sure you will not miss anything
about GT.M and VistA packaging.
> Please note that the "gtm" package in Debian now,
>
> http://packages.debian.org/lenny/gtm
>
> is not related to FIS-GT.M but instead, it is the
> "Multiple files transfer manager".
Yes, that's taken into account and thus the package name we have choosen
is fis-gtm.
> Making a Debian package for FIS-GT.M will greatly
> facilitate its adoption by a larger community of developers.
We are pretty aware of this and if you ask me we should start *now* with
the work needed on finalising the packaging. As you might know fis-gtm
needs kind of a bootstraping procedure which makes the integration into
Debian a bit more complex. So we need to prepare it now to make sure it
can be included into the next release. (It has some reason that fis-gtm
is listed as most wanted packages in the Debian Med HIS section[2].)
> We are in a mission to rebuild a community of about 3,000 developers
> to maintain and further develop VistA. This is probably a larger project
> than the Linux Kernel:
Good comparison - some kernel developers are Debian developers as well ...
> see here: https://github.com/OSEHRA/VistA-FOIA.
> with 26,000 routine files and 2.5 million lines of M code, than are probably
> equivalent to 10 million lines of C code.
>
>
>
> Would any one of you be willing
> to become a packager for FIS-GT.M ?
You mean one of those 3,000 developers mentioned above? I hope so! As
I said: We prepared something but nobody in our team has any idea about
Mumps nor VistA and we have no clue how to test whether it works. We
need some person with a strong interest (according to your e-mail like
you) in a Debian package, a solid knowledge about the program itself and
the willingness to dive a slight bit into Debian packaging - which is
really not that hard if you are a bit comfortable with shell and
Makefile programming. Our role is to guide you patiently into the
packaging process, fix bugs you might have done and complete things
inside the packaging which you might consider to complicated. This
strategy has worked in the past in several cases (we were starting to
take influence on the future some years ago which is now history :-)).
> and by doing so, make a dramatic contribution to
> change the future of Healthcare in the US and abroad...
Well, in principle this is the goal of Debian Med (even not expressed in
those dramatic words and without specifying any single country because
we are an international project anyway).
> Please help us build an Open Source environment for VistA !
We really would like to help. And as I said we have left the status
were any advocating and advertising is needed because we were pretty
aware of the role of VistA from the beginning of the Debian Med project
(back in 2002 - damn, I forgot to send congratulations[3]). To prove
my point you can ask the waybackmachine in 2002[4] (ups at this time
I seemed to have my time travelling device) and learn that it was listed
quite in the beginnig and remains there until today after our todo list
has improved (technically and content wise) a lot[5].
After introducing you a bit into the relation of Debian Med and VistA
what about the following work plan to make the turn from plain chatting
to real coding. You or an other Vista developer volunteers to work
inside the Debian Med team and takes over responsibility for the fis-gtm
packages. This developer should follow the following procedure:
0. Read our policy document carefully[6]. Most knowledge including
links you might need is condensed there
1. Create an account on http://alioth.debian.org
2. Once the account is enabled register for Debian Med team which
will grant commit permissions to the packaging repositories
3. Check out the relevant parts for fis-gtm (see above)
4. Try to build the packages using this stuff.
5. Test the packages
6. Ask us for uploading the packages once they are considered
ready.
For all steps: Please consult the mailing list for anything that might
remain unclear. We are open and helpful. Just trust us that we are on
the same side and very interested but we can not do the thing alone.
You might be interested in reading my next mail to the mailing list which
is not directly about VistA but I have also VistA in mind.
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-med
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMedTodo#Developers
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/01/msg00454.html
[4] http://web.archive.org/web/20020824182044/http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/his
[5] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/his
[6] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html
--
http://fam-tille.de
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