Re: DebianScience Unofficial Repository
Hi,
Chris Walker <chrisw@chiark.greenend.org.uk> (2008-07-12 17:41:41) :
> While trying to update the DebianScience wiki, I have come across
> http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/UnofficialRepository. This
> proposes an unofficial repository for Debian Science.
[...]
> So have we missed anything. Is there any point to it? Is anyone
> working on it, or is it dead? If it is dead, what should we do?
Well, I would say it is stalled. One of the stem idea came up during
a workshop at the science session at LSM 2006
(http://2006.rmll.info/theme_26?lang=en). The basic idea was to
provide 'in advance' software already packaged (.deb provided)
*outside* Debian (like on the web page of the packager -- see the old
versions of the pages of DebianScience in the wiki for such links) in
order to give them more exposure and have people contributing to the
improvement of packaging by helping the initial packagers.
One of the points was that some packages were not completely
suitable for main because of very few non-free dependencies (it used
to be the case of root-system, for example, before the work of
Christian Holm Christensen, and might be the case currently for
Salomé).
The real goal is to have ultimately everything done by a packager
(or a packaging team) inside Debian main. But it might take years
(asking for changes upstream) for this to be achieved.
No real work has been achieved on the repository idea yet.
I think that nowadays much exposure of such unofficial packages is
better done through Andreas tasks pages. But the link might be towards
a source package (or scm tool) that not every science user might be
able to use. So the idea of a repository for material not _yet_
suitable for main (for quality or freedom reasons) might not be
completely useless (like Ubuntu's PPA:
https://help.launchpad.net/PPAQuickStart -- I think that someone is
working on something similar in free software for Debian, maybe in a
Google Summer of Code project -- or Debian mentors).
Best regards,
Frédéric
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