Re: Packaging special packages
Hi Ole,
On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 09:54:36PM +0200, Olе Streicher wrote:
>
> On the other hand, these data become freely available for everyone [3],
> allowing (and ecouraging) the scientific re-use by the whole
> community. Especially for scientists without direct access to the
> telescope, this is an excellent opportunity for scientific work. I think
> that this perfectly fits into the best goals of the "Debian ethics".
I guess it is har to define any "Debian ethics" but the Blends concept
explicitly encourages to package specific software for some dedicated
purpose and a small set of users. So your attempt should be in line
with the Blends concept ... and you hopefully remember to maintain the
astronomy task once you have injected some packaging bits into VCS. ;-)
> Typically, binary packages of the pipeline code would have a footstamp
> of <~ 1MB. However, the pipelines are usually accompanied with a
> calibration data set, whose size ranges from some 100 kB to ~100 MB. The
> calibration files are needed to actually run the pipeline with some
> scientific result. I think it would be in any case too much to put all
> these data onto Debian mirrors, just for the few astronomers out there.
>
> So, having a package that downloads and installs the calibration data
> would be the best here, right? But this would make the packages no
> longer self-contained. Would that be a legal problem for a Debian
> package in main?
Hmmm, is a web browser allowed to download web pages from the internet?
I know, the comparison is not fully valid but should demonstrate the
principle. In Debian Med we have also packages that are able to
download gene sequence data. So IMHO your attempt is fine.
> What do you think: is it worth to upload these "pipeline" packages to
> Debian? Or is it better to keep them in some personal repository?
I'm in favour of uploading such programs to Debian.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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