[med-svn] r5573 - trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg

Thu Dec 9 21:52:11 UTC 2010

Author: moeller
Date: 2010-12-09 21:52:11 +0000 (Thu, 09 Dec 2010)
New Revision: 5573

Modified:
   trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex
Log:
More updates, also a section on backports, please extend.


Modified: trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex
===================================================================

--- trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex	2010-12-09 21:15:57 UTC (rev 5572)
+++ trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex	2010-12-09 21:52:11 UTC (rev 5573)
@@ -537,7 +537,7 @@
 just means the doer decides what gets done.
 
 That is the reason why Debian is often the platform of choice for
-researcher in the field of biology: Some biologists are Debian
+researcher in the field of computational biology: Some biologists are Debian
 maintainers and so they added support for biological packages. The
 more the Debian user in the field of biology report back about
 problems or wishes the more Debian maintainers are able to enhance
@@ -545,25 +545,31 @@
 
 \subsubsection{Metapackages}
 
-On the technical side \DebianMed contains a set of metapackages that
-declare dependencies on other Debian packages, and that way the
-complete system is prepared for solving particular tasks.  So the user
-has not to deal with the large number of package descriptions of 20000
-packages inside the Debian distribution -- it is just enough to seek
-for metapackages starting with prefix \package{med-} and install the
-metapackage of choice.  The package management system will care for
+Debian offers many tens of thousands of packages. It is considered
+helpful for the users (who might not have the right to install
+packages himself) to specify all biomedical software with
+one single instruction - to the local shell or to the local system
+administrator.
+
+\DebianMed contains a set of metapackages that
+declare dependencies on other Debian package to thus prepare
+the system for solving particular tasks.  The user
+then only seeks for metapackages starting with prefix \package{med-}
+and installs the metapackage of choice.
+The package management system will care for
 the installation of all packages that are in the list of dependencies
 of this metapackage - so the user can be sure that all packages he
 might need for the job will be installed on his system.  Once one of
-the metapackages is installed a special user menu will be created to
+the metapackages is installed, a special user menu will be created to
 enhance usability for the user working in the field of medicine.
 
-Currently inside \DebianMed applications are provided in certain
+Currently, inside \DebianMed applications are provided in certain
 categories: medical practice and patient management, medical research,
 hospital information systems, medical imaging, documentation,
 molecular biology and medical genetics and others.
 
-Each work field has an appropriate metapackage for instance
+%% This sounds somewhat redundant to me - SM
+Each work field has an appropriate metapackage, for instance
 \package{med-bio} for packages concerning molecular biology and
 medical genetics and \package{med-practice} which are helpful to
 manage a medical practice.  The sense of a metapackage is that you
@@ -585,16 +591,47 @@
 \label{figure:dmstats}
 \end{figure}
 
-Several Free Software projects which try to deal with small user group
-software started with a lot of enthusiasm but at some point in time
-developers had other interests or just were unable to maintain the
-project because of lack of man power.  The strategy of \DebianMed is
-to stay strictly inside Debian -- so even if manpower is a problem the
-whole infrastructure around will stay solid and does not drain extra
-resources.  So nobody of the \DebianMed team has to care about writing
-installers, running an online repository and mirrors work on a bug
-tracking system etc.  All this infrastructure is just there.
+Once a software was packaged, the effort for future maintenance is
+comparatively small. But one needs to be careful not to lose one's
+energy to investigate on bug reports and to follow the "upstream"
+development. Also, for many package maintainers, to understand
+the code of upstream, to learn from and to contribute to it is part
+of their motivation - and that does not scale. In the longer run,
+continuous growth can only come through additional contributors
+the the distribution. And with the Debian Maintainers program \marginpar{please add a ref},
+for anyone interested this is only a couple of emails away.
 
+% Should the Google Code-In and Google Summer of Code be mentioned?
+% What else would we have than those Google activities?
+% BOSC comes to mind, presentations on FOSDEM etc. Make a paragraph
+% of it if you like.
+% 
+%Debian is a continuous contributor to 
+
+%% one should not say something negative about someone else if 
+%% that is avoidable
+%Several Free Software projects which try to deal with small user group
+%software started with a lot of enthusiasm but at some point in time
+%developers had other interests or just were unable to maintain the
+%project because of lack of man power.
+
+%% This "within debian" could be interpreted negatively
+%The strategy of \DebianMed is
+%to stay strictly inside Debian -- so even if manpower is a problem 
+
+\DebianMed understands itself as a part of Debian.  The
+whole infrastructure around it will stay solid and does not drain extra
+for the DebianMed subcommunity. Admittedly, quite frequently the packaging
+for \DebianMed does mean to provide packages that are of interest for
+e.g. Java programmers at large and this way, the Debian itself profits
+from its blends. Also, the separation of \DebianMed from e.g. Debian Science
+is often artificial.
+But one can rest assured that one can reply on the Debian infrastructure
+and that with the preparation of the .deb package all porting to other
+architectures, 
+running an online repository and mirrors or to provide a bug
+tracking system etc. is all just already there.
+
 \begin{figure}[!htp]
 \centering
 \myinsertgraphic{authorstat.pdf}{100mm}{60mm}
@@ -624,6 +661,7 @@
 was growing constantly in the first years and is now at some constant
 level.
 
+% I would not show that
 Considering that some technical discussion was moved to the packaging
 list (see Figure \ref{figure:develstats}(a)) the number of postings of
 the most active people remained quite constant and only one member of
@@ -646,7 +684,19 @@
 did 5545 commits regarding packaging medical applications or
 documentation about the project.
 
+\subsubsection{Backports}
 
+Debian comes in releases. Once a release is out, updates to it are
+constrained on security-sensitive issues. New features may introduce
+regressions and are avoided. For scientific packages and for
+packages reacting to continuous changes in the health care system,
+this is not possible. The long established backports service \marginpar{please add ref}
+has now become integrated with Debian and offers updates to 
+the latest versions of packages while relying on the libraries - whenever
+possible - that we shipped with the official releases. This
+compromise brings maximal usability and maximal security
+together.
+
 \subsubsection{Role inside Debian}
 
 The Debian Pure Blends framework was mainly inspired by the \DebianMed


