Re: Science group on alioth
I would approach the question of a team by asking what values we have
as Debian science developers. I have already seen Andreas
representing consistency and attention to detail, and I would agree
that we should display these if we have a new team. I have some other
aesthetics too:
When I first got into scientific programming about twenty years ago, I
wanted to be as standard as possible. At first, that meant using
Numerical Recipes. Next, it seemed to mean using ANSI C/gcc. Then,
the Gnu Scientific Library. After a long time learning, I thought it
was a good goal to eventually become part of the GSL. But that took
years and GSL continued to grow while I refactored my programs. Now,
GSL is so big, I think maybe it does not want any more big software
modules. Therefore, I decided to fall back to GObject/glib which is
still pretty generic, with standard C and C++ mostly. And I am just
100% compatible and dependent on GSL, mostly for vector and matrix
types. I now have about a dozen scientific software packages and am
happy to organize them wherever it is convenient. But, I enjoy using
Mercurial more than Subversion, so I hope that is possible.
I enjoy making Erlang-style multi-language connectors (ncd --server)
for my programs and am excited to do that in 2008. Just explain how
the debian-science project can benefit my packages and I am sure my
packages will move themselves onto the project. As you can tell from
my focus, I like to explain the possibility for team cooperation based
on development principles. If we have overlap, there is probably a
reason to watch each other's repositories more carefully and maybe
work more on each other's sourcecodes. If we have little overlap,
this may be a frustrating and ultimately futile or pointless
distraction. For 2008, my focus is on testing, documenting, and
refactoring I think, as well as learning the Debian rules better.
Best regards,
Rudi
On Jan 28, 2008 12:29 PM, Sylvestre Ledru <sylvestre.ledru@inria.fr> wrote:
> Le lundi 28 janvier 2008 à 15:13 -0500, Ross Boylan a écrit :
> > On Sun, 2008-01-27 at 06:38 +0100, Christophe Prud'homme wrote:
> > > in my opinion the scope is quite broad : it spans the "sciences of
> > > computing",
> > > So pkg-scicomp should definitely not host all possible "science"
> > > packages.
> >
> > Speaking only as an onlooker, I thought the original idea (for
> > pkg-science) was to make the group for all (packaging of)
> > science-related stuff. "sciences of computing" sounds like "computer
> > science" to me, which is quite a bit narrower. I think you have
> > something different in mind than either "all science" or "computer
> > science," but I'm not sure what.
> Actually, it was the original idea. However, to work, we need a
> "critical mass" to work... And this mass is already existing on scicomp.
>
> If we are confident that both will exist and work, let's go!
>
> Sylvestre
>
>
--
Which is worse, ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares? --Erich Schubert
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