Re: Some questions regarding inclusion to the team
On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 09:10:53AM -0430, Muammar El Khatib wrote:
> I'll introduce myself. My name is Muammar. I'm chemist, and I have been
> involved in Debian for more than 2 and a half years now (how fast the
> time pass).
Welcome in the team. If you are a chemist you might also like to have
a look at
http://debichem.alioth.debian.org/
which might be interesting for you as well. I hope this perhaps new
information might not confuse you as a newcomer here on the science
list so I try to explain a bit.
The basic idea is the Debian Pure Blends concept which is explained
at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends (there is also a link to
a longish paper explaining the concept). The key to understanding the
concept is that as a distribution we should not only add more and
more packages to a pool but also try to form an environment where
users get comprehensive information and a platform for their whole
use cases of Free Software. The Wiki page contains links to so called
tasks and bugs pages which are one part of this effort and technically
we support metapackages and tasksel control files to enable users to
install relevant packages in a simple manner.
Historically this effort started with Debian Junior and Debian Edu
for educational issues as well as Debian Med which has also a strong
focus on biology which has high relevance in medical care. The
Debian Science project is kind of an umbrella for specific sciences
which do not undertook the step to a self-contained Blend. In my
eyes the DebiChem project as well as Debian GIS (for geographical
information systems) are potentially self-contained Blends and there
was even some preparation done. The preparation regarding chemistry
was done at
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Chemistry
and turned out in preliminary tasks files which enabled rendering
of tasks ans bugs pages which are available here
http://blends.debian.net/debichem
Just let us know what you as a chemist think about these pages.
IMHO we need to define better category names and descriptions and
I hope to get this done at DebConf together with Michael Banck.
It is important to understand that there is no conflict in having
packages in more than one Blend - several packages maintained by
the DebiChem packaging team are mentioned in the Debian Med
biology task and also Debian Science is using these in the chemistry
task. There is no "competition" between different Blends where
a package is maintained. The question to which Blend a package
"belongs to" is without sense: A package is maintained by a
maintainer or better a team of maintainers and a package belongs
to these (in the sense of the Maintainer field in the control file).
The role of a Blend is to find all packages belonging to certain
field of work and put these into categories. Usually a Blend
also has a packaging team to be able to ensure that packages of
this field are in a good shape - but there is no real need to
get a grip on packages which are prefectly well maintained by
other maintainers. It is just a QA measure we try to approach
on specific packages.
The consequence of this explanation would be: It is fine to maintain
a chemical package also in the DebiChem team. Just find out where
you get the best support for your packaging issues and where
you find the best channels of communication to your fellow maintainers.
Lurking on the Debian Science mailing list is always a good idea -
but I do not want to apply a competition between Debian Science,
pkg-scicomp, DebiChem or any other group. I found out that
pkg-scicomp works somehow invisible for me, they show up quite
seldomly on lists I read and give information about what they
are doing. So I decided this is not for me. But finally the
decision is yours - having an alioth account is necessary in any
case - so you did the right step.
> a) Does this package fit better in Debian Science or pkg-scicomp?
I hope the longish text above might enable you to answer this
question for yourself. As I said: For package maintenance it only
matters that a package is maintained properly with a high quality.
Join the team where you find the most effective help to do so.
> b) In the case that it fits in Debian Science, what are the right steps
> for joining you?
This was answered by others.
> I think that, for team-maintaining the package, I'll need access to
> Debian Science's alioth project, right?, in that case I have created an
> account called muammar-guest.
I have seen that somebody added you to Debian Science - fine ...
> I'd appreciate any information you can give me.
Thanks for supporting scientific software in Debian
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
Reply to: