[med-svn] r5542 - trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg

[Andreas Tille]

Author: tille
Date: 2010-12-06 23:14:16 +0000 (Mon, 06 Dec 2010)
New Revision: 5542

Modified:
   trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/debian-med.tex
   trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex
Log:
Evaluate the sense of derived distributions.


Modified: trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/debian-med.tex
===================================================================
--- trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/debian-med.tex	2010-12-06 22:35:22 UTC (rev 5541)
+++ trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/debian-med.tex	2010-12-06 23:14:16 UTC (rev 5542)
@@ -3,6 +3,11 @@
 % Revisions: 02 December 2010
 
 \documentclass[a4paper]{article}
+
+% get rid of some old paragraphs without really deleting them
+\newif\ifmetacomment
+\metacommentfalse
+
 \usepackage{times}
 \usepackage{ifpdf}
 \ifpdf % we use PDFLaTeX

Modified: trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex
===================================================================
--- trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex	2010-12-06 22:35:22 UTC (rev 5541)
+++ trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex	2010-12-06 23:14:16 UTC (rev 5542)
@@ -345,8 +345,9 @@
     biological software}.
 \end{description*}
 
-\subsection{Bioinformatics Live CDs}
+\subsection{Dedicated bioinformatics and medical distributions}
 
+\ifmetacomment
 The concept of a live CD allows to create a CD or DVD that boots a
 computer, starts a defined set of application without a user's
 intervention and has all tools in place that suits a particular
@@ -400,8 +401,53 @@
 more in order to share the burden of maintenance and updates. With
 Debian they have he right basic infrastructure. The time will show,
 whose packages will gain most momentum.
+\fi
 
+In 2003 to 2005 the advent of several adapted distributions with a
+focus on bioinformatics and medicine could be observed.  Most of them
+were Knoppix\cite{knopper:2005} (and thus indirectly Debian) based.
+The motivation for such distributions was, that it simply was possible
+for a quite small team of less than five people to issue some kind of
+a product which had the following features:
+\begin{itemize*}
+  \item easy to assemble
+  \item fit the personal needs of this specific work group
+  \item cute web page intended to attract users
+%% FIXME should be mentioned  later in comparison to Debian Med
+  \item sloppy about policy of the underlying Debian system
+  \item sloppy about the licenses of the included programs
+\end{itemize*}
 
+It is hard to estimate the user base of these distributions but it can
+be assumed that it was basically used inside the institution where the
+developers are working because it is usually an offspring of their
+daily work.  As a consequence of this there was usually no great
+effort done to set up some bug tracking system or other means for an
+effective user interaction (frequently used mailing list, active IRC
+channel etc.)
+
+%FIXME: security!
+
+It turned out that this was to distribute Free Medical Software is not
+very sustainable.  Some of these distributions issued only one single
+release, others stayed longer but they are continuously draining
+manpower.  So there are no security updates available and the
+distribution persists in the state of general software tools at the
+point in time when the fork from Debian / Knoppix / other distribution
+was done.  The latter fact makes this approach to distribute software
+for sensible medical data unacceptable.
+
+That's why Debian Med has a different approach.  The initial team was
+also quite small but has grown in the eight years of existence to more
+than 20 active maintainers.  The idea is to maintain medical
+applications {\em inside} Debian.  This automatically solves all
+drawbacks of the separate distributions mentioned above: There are
+security updates provided without any specific effort of the Debian
+Med team.  There is a huge and reliable infrastructure with a bug
+tracking system, several FTP servers all over the world, autobuilders
+and an QA team running intense tests regarding software quality (see
+above).
+
 \subsection{Comparison with \DebianMed}
 
 \subsubsection{Other fields than only biology}