[Debichem-devel] [Announce] New tasks web pages for all CDDs

[Michael Banck]

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 09:28:13AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Jul 2008, Michael Banck wrote:
> 
> > So it seems somebody went forth with this, at least there is now a
> > science-chemistry package I never heard about before.  So far, I
> > understood the nice task web pages as just some aggregation of packages
> > based on debtags or other criteria, and was not aware they actually
> > reflect some real task package (probably because I was too busy with
> > real life to properly pay attention to debian-science over the last
> > months).
> 
> Well, to make things clear: the science-chemistry package is not
> really related to DebiChem.  It is rather a workaround the fact that
> there are not yet any DebiChem tasks packages available.  You mentioned
> that you was to busy to follow all these threads here.  My arguing for
> a general Science CDD was that we try to collect science related packages
> somehow in these meta packages even if we know that some more fine grained
> categorising would be needed.  We just want to give those experts like you
> an initial home until there are enough people to care for a specific CDD
> that works on the packages of the actual science.  Chemistry is the only
> field were we just have this situation that there is a strong packaging
> team around and we could talk about a separate CDD.

Ok.
 
> > Now the question is how to go from here.  Personally, I have the feeling
> > the easiest way would be for the debichem team to maintain the
> > science-chemistry package similar as the debian-med team seems to do for
> > most biology packages.
> 
> Well, my idea would rather be that you might work on meta packages named
> chemistry-<subfield_1>, chemistry-<subfield_2>, ...

Ok, good.
 
> > Otherwise, how are we going to request changes to the task package?
> 
> Just change
> 
>      http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/cdd/projects/science/trunk/debian-science/tasks/chemistry?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
> 
> Or in the case of separate DebiChem maintained meta packages just create
> 
>      http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/cdd/projects/debichem
>
> > Should we file wishlist bug reports?
> 
> I would prefer if you would join the CDD team on alioth.

I've requested to be added to the cdd alioth project now.

> > Also, I am not sure all possible chemistry packages make sense as being
> > part of some meta-package - e.g. we got several 2D chemistry structure
> > editors (even several for GTK), so it might be best to choose one or two
> > to be installed by default and have the others available to the user
> > otherwise (through debtags or maybe some 1-click-install link on the
> > task overview web page).
> 
> The meta packages can feature Recommends and Suggests - so you probably
> want to recommend the more important packages (in a potential
> chemistry-structureeditors metapackage if you like my plan above or
> just in science-chemistry).  Just suggest the less important packages.
> The tasks web pages do not yet implement the feature to separate between
> Recommends and Suggests - this is on top of my todo list for DebConf.
> So you can expect to have this visualised on the tasks pages at end
> of August.

OK. 
 
> > In any case, I don't want to spread too much stop-energy here - the
> > whole Debian Science thing seems to lift off nicely and gain momentum!
> 
> Yes - I'm really happy about this.  But as I said I would regard a fruitful
> cooperation between DebiChem maintained specific meta packages and Debian
> Science just profits from your work by including the meta packages like
> it is done in
> 
>     http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/science/tasks/biology.html
> 
> which shows the second missing feature in the tasks generating pages -
> there the meta package dependencies should be resolved nicely.
> 
> IMHO the best thing you could do is to categorise all available packages
> that are interesting for working in the field of Chemestry and I would
> volunteer to wrap the meta package stuff around to give you a kick start.

OK, I'll try to look into this in the near future.


thanks,

Michael