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Re: agent-based simulation



On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 09:44 -0700, Scott Christley wrote:
> On Oct 20, 2008, at 11:20 AM, Ross Boylan wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 2008-10-18 at 21:07 -0700, Scott Christley wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I've been recently doing some work with the debian-med group to
> >> package some software.  There is a software package called Swarm (http://www.swarm.org
> >> ) which is an agent-based simulation toolkit that I would like to
> >> package into Debian.  It was suggested that I email this list as
> >> debian-science has a broader view.  I looked through the metapackages
> >> listed on the wiki, but its unclear which is appropriate.  Agent- 
> >> based
> >> simulation is a general methodology and can be used for biology,
> >> social science, or other computational sciences.  Is debian-science
> >> interested in modeling and simulation software?  Can anybody suggest
> >> an appropriate group?
> >>
> >> thanks
> >> Scott
> >>
> > I have some interest in agent based modeling, and it seems like an
> > appropriate topic to me.  But I don't have time to do any of the work
> > right now.
> 
> I'm happy to do all of the packaging work, so no need for you to spend  
> time on that.  Plus some work has been done already for packaging an  
> older version of Swarm, so that is a starting point for me.  I'm new  
> to the Debian community so maybe I'm going about this the wrong way.   
> Essentially I'm asking if Debian-science is the right place for this  
> software, and if so what is the best way to get started?
> 
> thanks
> Scott
Since those who know more haven't said anything, I'll give you my
impressions of things.

To get a package into the official debian distribution you need a
sponsor who is a Debian Developer and is authorized to upload packages.
They can also help you out with the process.

http://www.debian.org/devel/ is a good jumping off place for info on
packaging things.

Of course, you can prepare a package without bothering with such things,
but getting it in the distribution offers a lot of advantages:
visibility, access to many different platforms (autobuilders make
packages for many different hardware configurations), greater likelihood
of help maintaining the package, automatic world-wide distribution, and
the bug tracking system.  Against this is the higher overhead, at least
initially, and the fact that there often seem to be difficulties getting
packages to build on one or more platforms.

There is a list, debian-mentors (not sure of exact name) where one can
solicit help and sponsorship.  My impression from previous traffic on
this list is that they often send people to this list for scientific
software.  As I said, yours seems to fit.

This list is more oriented toward users of scientific software; a list
specifically about packaging scientific software was recently created.
But a lot of developer type discussion seems to happen here.


debian-science is a mailing list and a loose collaboration focused on
scientific software; it also has some wiki pages.  I don't think it is a
formal group or a particular customized distribution, nor do I think
there is any central authority to say "go ahead with x."

I am mostly an onlooker and consumer in this whole process, so all of
the above is just a best guess, and is certainly not authoritative.

Ross

P.S. Is swarm currently designed to support more than a single thread of
execution?  A quick look at the web site suggested that parallelism was
hoped for, but not yet present.  And the discussion seemed more oriented
to threads than clusters.


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