Re: Alioth project to use is pkg-science
On Sun, 11 May 2008, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
I rejected your debian-science project request because I simply don't see
the point of it compared to the existing pkg-science. You can do much more
than packaging even behind the pkg-science umbrella.
I agre, that you perfectly can do a lot of things under any umbrella
but previous experience showed that it is hard to explain to newcommers
what we want and what we do, if a name is descriptive per se but does
not describe the right thing. Newcomers tend to blindly guess what
the name means and thus it should not be missleading.
pkg-science is just a
Unix group associated to the resources that you have available on
alioth.debian.org, you're free to use the name "Debian Science" in all the
rest of your communication...
Furthermore AFAIK debian-science@l.d.o never marketed itself as a custom Debian
distribution
It is my declared intend to do exactly this because I regard a list
that just discusses random issues of packaging scientific software
as to less to tackle the main target, which IMHO is making Debian
the distribution of choice for scientists.
and as such a "debian-science" name is not really warranted.
Even if I'm busy enough with Debian Med issues I would love to bring
in all my experiences running a CDD and try to form a CDD team here
on this list which warrants the Debian Science name.
I just had two talks about a Debian Science CDD which gathered serious
interest. In the CDD repository do exist sources for meta packages at
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/cdd/projects/science/trunk/debian-science/?rev=0&sc=0
which are not yet released and I'm unsure whether they will hit
Lenny right in time, but on the basis of this work some preliminary
auto generated web pages at
http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/science/tasks/
are builded. So things are beginning to change and the thread starting
at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2008/05/msg00022.html
(which is a little bit longish and drifts in different directions)
leaded to the agreement that pkg-sci* is probably not the best name
for what we want.
And pkg-* is the norm for Alioth projects that deal mainly with packaging.
This is right but we cactually want to do more than mainly packaging
which is exactly the reason for asking for a new name.
What I see here is a lot of pointless discussions and lack of some
leadership to take a decision.
This is perfectly correct. Missing leadership is a problem in
Debian Science but I'm optimistic that this can be solved. I will
definitely not take over leadership of a second CDD but will try
to support decision makers inside the project with all my experience
I made. I'm very optimistic that something will grow from the
current situation and I will smoothen the path to establish a fully
grown CDD at DebConf 8.
I hope that you can live with this decision (that I took in the place
of your group since there was no clear consensus). If in the end, if
you really decide together you want to get debian-science instead of
pkg-science, I'd ask you to open a support request ticket to resurrect
debian-science and delete pkg-science at the same time and I'd like this
request to be "sponsored" by two Debian developers to show there's some
momentum behind this rename.
This is exactly the plan and I would support this (you've got one of
the two DD's ;-)).
Now please contentrate on real work instead of discussing the group
name. :-)
This is a sane advise and I perfectly agree that seeking for names
is one of the most disgusting things that steal work time from people.
I hope I made this clear enough in my postings. But from my point of
view enough people voted for debian-science in the end of the thread
which I would regard as a decision.
Thanks for maintaining alioth
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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