Re: How much interest in a "debian-science.org" repository?
On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 19:03, Kevin B. McCarty wrote:
> On 7/19/06, Carlo Segre <segre@iit.edu> wrote:
> > On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Jordan Mantha wrote:
> >
> > > I would hope that it would also foster collaborative maintenance of the
> > > packages too. Having a single source for source packages as well as the
> > > binaries would be great. Maybe even some svn repos for maintaining the
> > > packaging. On that thought, would Alioth be of any help for this?
> > >
> >
> > I think that Alioth would only be good for packages which could go into
> > main.
>
> That reminds me of another question I had. Maybe it's too early to
> bring up but I'll ask it anyway.
>
> What would be the best way to organize the archive by section? The
> usual divisions "main contrib non-free" are fine for Debian, but one
> of the main reasons an unofficial repository is needed is the
> often-poor state of care to licenses in scientific software that makes
> them unsuitable for Debian's archive. Probably the only software in
> "main" in the repo would be either things undergoing testing on their
> way to the Debian official archive, or Free software that's too
> obscure to package for Debian. (I'm thinking of CERN's "patchy" as an
> example for the latter.)
>
> So I was thinking perhaps a division by field makes more sense -
> "analysis astronomy biology chemistry physics" etc. A typical
> sources.list line might then look something like
>
Trying this way would be another usage of the classification system
available on installed systems to find applications on Debian and Ubuntu
systems. Maybe also derived from the tags collected via the deb-tag
browser.
See discussion some weeks in the past on this list (may, 14 .. 17).
What I have learned there, one should not overstress this.
As you mention below, this has the risk of putting the same thing into
several classes.
Another idea came up to divide into something more task oriented like
plotting, visualisation, data processing.
>From my point of view, each has its pros and cons.
So for a complete repository/site/.. choosing an easy maintainable
structure may be the first goal. Maybe so simple as by A, B, C, ...
Where each package is tagged with attributes mentioned above.
And one can search or list the packages by tag.
> deb http://www.debian-science.org/ physics analysis
>
> Maybe some packages could be made available under more than one field
> (e.g. ROOT under both physics and analysis)? After all, ROOT and
> (e.g.) PAW aren't intrinsically physics software (unlike say GEANT),
> they're just traditionally used by physicists. Comments?
>
Exactly the point I described above. Use a simple maintainable repo
structure with a front-end showing the classification.
Lots of tools are used / can be used by a very broad user base, some a
very specific.
Hope this helps.
Kind Regards,
Thomas
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