Re: advice/help needed for including new software in debian (science)
On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 10:54 AM, Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org> wrote:
> Hi Felipe,
>
> thanks for your interest in Debian Science.
>
> On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 06:29:32AM -0200, Felipe Figueiredo wrote:
>> I have developed two scientific simulators of biological interest
>> [1,2], and want to include them in Debian.
>
> Cool - I think you did the right step to ask on a team list. While
> Debian Science is perfectly fine we deal with (micro-)biology basically
> inside the Debian Med team. I'm not fully sure whether MMRRSim[1] fits
> that medical scope so well but I'm pretty sure about TRepid[2].
Yes, TRepid is well suited for debian-med. MMRRSim is applicable in
the ecology field, not necessarilly medical one, which is why I
submitted the initial request for help to d-science instead of d-med.
I hope this was ok.
> I'd recommend having a look into the Debian Med team policy document [0]
> because I have the strong feeling that most of your questions are
Thanks for the pointer, it seems to have very much of what I need for
now. I will take a look at it later this week.
> answered. Yes, it is correct that you should provide some downloadable
> versioned tarball of your software and if you do not mind using Git
> rather than bzr (well, we need to restrict the number of VCS somehow to
> make sure not every team member needs to become a "various VCS expert")
> you can commit your debian/ packaging to the Debian Med team Git (or SVN
I expected this might be the case, since bzr does not seem to have a
major user base, at least compared to git. When I started using it, it
really seemed to have a softer learning curve, and now I'm very much
used to it. I don't mind using git, though, especially since AFAIUI it
should be easy to migrate to/from git/bzr.
Just to be sure I'm following you: the packaging will no longer be
done in the upstream site, but rather debian itself? After I fix the
packaging as per [0], it will all be migrated to a debian server and
mantained there? Then, the current packaging branch in LP will be
abandoned.
> if you prefer this). Everything is verbosely written down[0] - feel free
> to contact us on the list in case there might be some open questions
> remaining.
Great! I do have several questions.
What about bug reporting? I'd prefer to check for users feedback in
only one place, which I setup upstream in launchpad (as opposed to one
bug tracker per distro - I also intend to eventually submit to
Fedora).
Another question is about the user base. I don't expect MMRRSim to
generate a large user base, as is a somewhat specific case of a more
broadly used ecological experiment. Although it is possible, I
currently I have no plans to expand it to a more generic simulation
environment (as I hope TRepid might be perceived). Does this affect
its acceptability in Debian?
Also, as soon as the packaging is corrected, and proof-read by experts
and machine-reading programs in your pipeline, I think it will be
fairly easy to package new versions myself, so I don't mind being the
maintainer (or be a part of a maintainer group, if that is ok with you
guys). I expect both MMRRSim and TRepid to stabilize development after
a while, as seem to be usual in some scientific fields.
> Kind regards and thanks for providing these programs as Free Software
>
> Andreas.
>
> [0] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html
>
best regards
FF
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