Re: Debian for Systems Biology
On Sun, 29 Jan 2006, Luca Brivio wrote:
On Sun, 29 Jan 2006 10:24:09 +0900
Charles Plessy <charles-debian-nospam@plessy.org> wrote:
But I think that the real problem is that most academic software is
non-free, as it often mentions "Do not make money with our work, or
share it with us". Thus splitting debian-med would result in
dilluting sparse packages into something not really useful.
That's likely true. It's also true that things are slowly
changing... and we can run in that direction ;-)
Well, IMHO it makes no sense to split up Debian-Med before something
else covers the problem we solve. IMHO the Custom Debian Distribution
idea (Debian-Med is one of the CDDs see
http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/ )
is about grouping sunsets of Debian into practical pieces of software
that a certain group of users needs. There might be intersection inbetween
these subsets which means if there would be an imaginary Debian-Science CDD
or a Debian-Bio CDD that some packages could be included via the meta
packages in more than one CDD. So if a biologist installs a imaginary
meta package 'bio-genetics' it might perfectly be possible that a user
working in medical care installs the 'med-bio' package (which just exists!)
and gets nearly the same set of packages on his box.
Then, why don't we try to gather more packages related to
computational biology, and when a critical mass is reached, we could
discuss with Andreas and the debian-med people to ask if a renaming
of the project into something like debian-biomed would make sense?
I told about software that often concerns mathematics and biochemistry
etc. more than medicine, does make it sense that all what's
biology-related become part of debian-med/bio-med, included e.g.
industrial biotech? Well, it perhaps make some sense until the mass of
free software in these fields doesn't exceed one threshold...
So just start caring for an optimal solution for biologists before you
try to start arguing how we can stop users in medical care from easily
installing some biology related software, right. It is not the problem
of Debian-Med that there is no other help for biologists that they get
some comfort by installing apackage that starts with 'med-'.
Why don't we create a very simple wiki page?
My personal experience of Wiki pages in small projects is that they
are not really maintained. That's why I save my personal time and
do not create such a page. If you think differently - just start the
page. I will not stop you. ;-))
I can help for testing or translating packages (a surprisingly big
number of computational biologists are very uncomfortable with
english). If there is a lot of packaging to do, well, you would have
to teach me...
and me too! I can help in the same things, And I'll try soon to make
some unofficial packages.
This would be great. You can count on my support in sponsoring these
packages.
Charles, if you would to contact me you can see below ;-)
Just use the mailing list here.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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