On Wed, 11 Mar 2009, Michael Hanke wrote:
I think that it would be useful to have such a package, as the interesting candidate packages are a bit scattered around. Neuroscience research includes conducting psycho(logical,physical) experiments (pyepl), brain-imaging related work (med-imaging, although not necessarily targeting medical topics), including analysis and visualization (science-imageanalysis, -numericalcomputation), but also the statistical analysis of behavioral data (science-statistics). As large parts of the neurosciences are closely-related to psychology it could also absorb packages not even listed in any task right now (e.g. praat). ... I'd volunteer to take care of such a meta-package, if that is necessary at all, or helps to establish such.
I'm in favour of this idea. As I explained here several times in the past
I see Debian Science as a pool of potentialy separate Blends dealing with
and specific science which might sit here until there is enough interest
and man power to form a stand-alone team. In some fields this might happen
in others this might never happen and they might sit under the Debian
Science umbrella for ever - that's fine and that's definitely better than
if there would be no support of the scientists in this field at all.
So finally the idea is to provide a structured access to people working
in a specific field and your users in the field of neuroscience will be
very happy if you assemble a set of packages that will be useful for
their day to day work. Is there anything against making users happy?
There might be an arguing that there are other specific applied sciences
which might "deserve" their own task which ends up in a metapackage.
Well, yes, there definitely are - but the question is always: Who is
willing to do the work to assemble a reasonable list of packages (if
there are such packages inside Debian at all). IMHO this is the cruxial
point here. So if you are willing to do this - just go for it.
(To enable you injecting the tasks file I just added you to the
Debian Pure Blends project on alioth.)
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de