Re: How much interest in a "debian-science.org" repository?
On Fri, 2006-07-21 at 06:38, Luca Ingianni wrote:
> Am Freitag, 21. Juli 2006 00:03 schrieb Thomas Walter:
> > On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 13:53, Daniel Leidert wrote:
> > > Am Mittwoch, den 19.07.2006, 13:03 -0400 schrieb Kevin B. McCarty:
>
> > > I really vote for using the main/contrib/non-free section model. This
> > > would also help to see, which packages might be worth a try to get them
> > > into Debian officially, which should be the goal in every case.
> >
> > An answer in this thread said, scientist often don't care about
> > licenses. And often they are allowed to do so. Often applications have
> > exceptions for non-commercial use or usage for research tasks. The
> > latter is easily proven when working for an institute or university.
> > As a conclusion, separating science applications into
> > main/contrib/non-free does not make much sense in these cases. As
> > scientist I can put the most into main.
> > So a high level classification into something like libraries, plotting,
> > visualisation, WEB, GUI, common, ... (only a collection of items as
> > example) would be more appropriate I think.
>
> My two cents: bad idea.
> There is a reason why Debian itself does not use such an approach, and it is
> precisely the one that was mentioned before: if you split the repository up,
> people will either have huge sources.list entries or possibly miss useful
> software. And classification may not always be that straightforward either.
> Now, for the not caring about licenses argument: that's the idea about the
> traditional structure (main, contrib, non-free). Including non-free in your
> sources translates to not caring about licenses. RMS will only use main. I,
> on the other hand, couldn't care less and so use non-free as well.
> To pick up your argument, maybe we ought to include a new section for software
> which is free for academic use only, but your proposal overly complicates
> things, and besides, a different mechanism for the classification of software
> already exists - let's use that.
>
I have not talked about splitting, maybe wrong wording. Have a look at
http://alioth.debian.org/softwaremap/trove_list.php
In repo similar to that, you have one source and one list of packages.
Each package holds tagged attributes and you can select what you want to
be installed on your box.
By the way, what is the license status of 'contrib'? Is it: not
'non-free' and not 'free' in the debian spirit. So where in this 3-way
system does SW go if license contains exceptions for 'non-commercial,
non-profit, students, research, education, privat'?
Kind Regards,
Thomas
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