Re: Proposal and questions about chemistry Debian packages
--- Frits Daalmans wrote:
...have recently obtained a new program for molecular modelling. It was
produced under the GPL and (very well) written in C (IMHO).
...
- If I contact the author of this 'moldy' program, Keith Refson, and
ask his permission to compile and package it for Linux (only i386 for
now), in which Debian mailinglists must I discuss this proposal to get
it accepted?
--- end of quote ---
It appears that others have taken up your other question(s), but not this one,
so I'll take a crack at it.
Probably the best source of information on this subject is at
http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/debian-faq-14.html
which answers the question, "How can I become a Debian software developer?"
Since Debian is a volunteer effort, the packages included in Debian are mostly
the ones that somebody wanted badly enough to go ahead and package them. If
this 'moldy' program is the one you were referring to as being under GPL, there
will be no problem - your package will probably go into the main distribution.
Otherwise, the program may have to go into either contrib or non-free,
depending on how it has been released.
In any case, the official policy is that "development of Debian is open to all,
and new users with the right skills and/or willingness to learn are needed...",
so I would encourage you to go ahead and get started on making a package.
I'm not in chemistry myself, so I don't know if this program will do it, but it
might be just the right thing to convince my father to try Debian - I know he's
been trying out molecular modeling programs for teaching purposes for a while,
and if the software was free, that would help a lot towards getting the
tightwads in charge of his university's budget to approve it :-)
Stephen Ryan Debian GNU/Linux 1.3.1
Mathematics graduate student, Dartmouth College
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