Re: Chemistry wiki page

[Chris Walker <chrisw@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de> writes:

> On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Chris Walker wrote:
> 
> > apbs Adaptive Poisson Boltzmann Solver in particular I don't know how
> > to categorise.
> >
> > I have also included the abinitio package abinit and OpenMX - from the
> > physics task, and the v-sim structure viewer (again from the physics
> > task). Should these be added to the science-chemistry task?
> 
> Well, there is certainly an overlap between physics and chemistry
> as it is as well between chemistry and biology.  But there is no
> reason to not list a package in both sections.  The sections just
> assemble what chemistrist need for their work.  Do you think there
> is a reason to leave a package out because the package is needed
> by physicists or biologists?

No. I think they should be included in the task package, but I'm a
physicist and don't want to force my opinion on chemists.

In addition to the task packages, I'd like to see a categorised list
something like https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuScience where
packages are predominantly not repeated.

I do wonder whether there might be some merit in splitting the support
packages off[1] - the physics package contains 5 Matlab/IDL like packages[2], 3
symbolic maths packages[3], 2 data acquisition package and 1 gui package
for fitting data - and clearly these have use in things like engineering. 

I don't think we should include every possible package in the task
packages - I think we should only include those useful to a scientist
doing research. If packages are obsolete or poor quality, we probably
shouldn't include them in the tasks. Even better would be a review of
the alternative packages that seem to do the same thing, but that sort
of thing takes a lot of expertise to write.


Chris

[1] Perhaps the viewing package is the right place for this.  
[2] Should I add Yorick to these, or does it fit better with gnuplot,gri ?
[3] maxima,sympy and axiom. I've just added axiom, but have noticed it
on the RC bug list, so maybe I'd be better to remove it.