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

[Andreas Tille]

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.

> 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>, ...

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

Kind regards and thanks for your interest

       Andreas.
-- 
http://fam-tille.de