[Debian-pan-maintainers] Bits from the Debian-PAN team for the Tango meeting

Tue May 19 09:29:55 BST 2015

Hi,

This is the first email presenting the Debian-PAN team and its
involvement around the Tango community.

Contents
========

1. Debian-PAN Team.
2. Debian 8 (Jessie) Released
3. Debian 9 (Stretch) Roadmap
4. Debian-PAN Roadmap
5. Astronomy community

1. Debian-PAN Team
==================

The Debian-PAN team was created during the Debian-Sciences Sprint
organized at the ESRF [1a], in order to help maintaining software used
in our Photon And Neutron facilities.

The basic idea, is to create common interests between institutes, in
order to facilitate collaborations, reduce the NIH temptation and
increase the software offer available in each institute.

If you can be sure that the software running in another
facilities can be used in ours with a single liner command

apt-get install <package>

you can be more confident to use it instead of developing your home
made solution and maintaining it forever.

We shared the users base (and why not contributors) between all our
institutes, so instead of fragmenting the community , the Debian-PAN
effort propose to work on the integration at the OS level in order to
reduce the entropy.

This is specially true when it comes to process 2D images with OpenCL
solutions. In this case, you need to have a fully working stack from
the Linux kernel, the GPU driver, the OpenCL libraries to your
software.

Thanks to Debian, Debian-Science, a lot of this work is already done
for you. Nvidia drivers, OpenCL stack, hdf5 library (openMPI,
serials, ...), the Python ecosystem, openjdk7/8, haskell ;), ...

This project started 9 years ago with the first attempt to add the
Tango package in order to have an easy way to install and maintain the
TANGO database on top of the Debian OS.

So thanks to this effort, you can now :

apt-get install mysql-server
apt-get install tango-db ...

in 10 different architectures (arm, amd64, i386, mips, ...)

People from ESRF, PETRAIII and SOLEIL are now involved and share
this vision.

The more people involved in this effort, the less effort it will be
for you and your institut to install and maintain your software stack.
Moreover, Debian beind the source for Ubuntu, itself being the source
for Linux-MINT, one single packaging effort makes the software
available on all three most popular linux distribution [1d], hence a
large fraction of the Linux ecosystem.

So let's join the effort [1c] and package more softwares in the
Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/... to make it easier than ever to share common
softwares in our communities.

[1a] http://www.esrf.eu/events/conferences/debian-for-scientific-facilities-days-1
[1b] http://blends.debian.net/pan/tasks/
[1c] https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-pan 
[1d] http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

2. Debian 8 (Jessie) Released
=============================

After two years of efforts, the Debian community is pleased to announce
that Debian 8 (Jessie) is out [2a] (april 2015).

The Tango related packages available are listed here.

tango   8.1.2c+dfsg-5
pytango 8.1.5-1
taurus  3.3.1+dfsg-1
sardana 1.4.2-1

- useful for PAN facilities.

   pymca        4.7.4+dfsg-1
   python-fabio 0.1.4
   pyfai        0.10.2-1
   libcerf      1.3-2
   libclipper   2.1.20130601-2
   libccp4      6.4.5-2
   libmmdb      1.25.5-2
   python-mmtk  2.7.9-1
   libssm       1.3-2
   ...

[2a] https://www.debian.org/News/2015/20150426

3. Debian 9 (Stretch) Roadmap
=============================

The work has already started for the next Debian stable release,
named (Stretch). Here are the known transitions planed for this
release which can affect the Tango Community.

+ remove Qt4 superseded by Qt5  [3a]

+ Python3[3b] will be the default for Debian 9 or Debian 10. The idea is
to create a maximum of python3-<module> package in order to have a
Python3 compliant Debian infrastructure.
a mailing list[?] was setup to help people trying to migrate there code

+ python-numpy > 1.9.0 will be uploaded. It will get rid of the old
CAPI. So you need to check that all your Python extensions compiles
with the new numpy already available in Debian experimental.

[3a] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/05/msg00001.html
[3b] https://lwn.net/Articles/642334/

4. Debian-PAN roadmap
=====================

The first priority of the Team will be to maintain the already
packaged softwares and there reverse dependencies.

Here a list of packages we are working on and which could be
integrated in the next Debian release.

- Jerome Kieffer (ESRF)
  - clfft (the AMD OpenCL fft library)
  - pyfai (add the continuous integration tests)
  - python-fabio (add the continuous integration tests)
- Eugen Wintersberge (PetraIII)
  - python-xrayutilities (need to fix some licenses issues)
  - libpnicore
  - libpniio
  - python-pnicore
  - python-pniio
  - pnitools 
- Picca Frédéric-Emmanuel (Soleil)
  - pyhst2
  - libhkl5
  - crystfel
  - pymca4 -> pymca5

[1] https://www.debian.org/News/2015/20150426
[2] http://blends.debian.net/pan/tasks/
[3] https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-astro/
[4] http://blends.debian.net/science/tasks/astronomy
[5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/05/msg00001.html

5. Astronomy community
======================

It seems that the astronomy community (ERAS[5a], SKA[5b], ...) has
already joined us. Hopefully a Debian-Astro team[5c]
is already working on this subject. So do not hesitate to contact them.

you can find a list of the software already packaged here [5d]

[5a] http://erasproject.org
[5b] http://www.tango-controls.org/community/news/2015/04/15/ska-choose-tango/
[5c] https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-astro/
[5d] http://blends.debian.net/science/tasks/astronomy