[Debichem-devel] RfC: Non-packaging TODO items

[Michael Banck]

Hi,

there's a couple of things I've been thinking about which are not
packaging-related, but might still be nice to do, either for lenny or
lenny+1:

 * Chemistry-related task packages.  Personally, I think the package
   overviews at http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/debichem/tasks/ are really
   neat, and are something I eventually wanted to do on wiki.debian.org
   or so anyway.  What needs to be done is a good classification of
   programs and then implementing the tasks.  I think it'd be easiest if
   the classification was done at
   http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Chemistry and then merged into
   the task packages from the cdd alioth project, as Chris Walker has
   done already.  So if you are interested, check out the above wiki
   page and rearrange/add/remove packages and/or categories (but please
   add a rationale to your wiki changelog entry).

 * Get some prioritization of packages with similar functionality.  For
   example, right now we have quite a few 2D chemical structure drawing
   programs and simple 3D viewers.  At some point, I think it makes no
   sense to just package them all for Debian, or keep them around
   indefinetly, if better alternatives are available.  Exception might
   be toolkit-specific apps; e.g. if there is only one good 3D viewer
   for Qt/KDE, then we might keep it instead of preferring a GTK+ one.
   However, we could still have a "recommended" app for a specific task,
   like saying avogadro is the better choice for molecular modelling than
   ghemical, even in a GNOME/GTK environment.
  
   Also, this sort of overlaps with the above task classification, as we
   might not want to have every package installed by default (e.g., I
   think xdrawchem and chemtool are candidates for not being installed
   by default, or maybe even to be reomved from stable/the archive
   eventually

   Not sure how to do this, maybe just add some scores at
   http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Chemistry ?

 * Package tags.  I am not sure on the state of this, and especially if
   it would be possible to introduce new tags at this point, as opposed
   to just tagging packages with the correct sets of tags.  Maybe it
   would be easiest to just do this on the same wiki page as for tasks,
   http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Chemistry, by adding the list of
   current tags for each package, and then at some point submit a fixed
   list to the package tags maintainers or so.

 * Screenshots.  Recently, http://screenshots.debian.net have been
   announced.  Andreas Tille already announced that he might integrate
   them into the task pages; I think that would be a good thing to have
   for the GUI-oriented chemistry packages. One thing I'd like to see is
   some consistency along desktop environment, i.e. using the usual
   standard GNOME and KDE themes so all respective screenshots look
   alike.

 * Consistent descriptions.  I think some more consistent package
   description would be useful; at least for those packages under our
   control.  I already revised a couple of them (mostly pymol, mpqc and
   psicode I think), but it would be nice to have similar descriptions
   for similar packages, while pointing out the differences.  For
   example, I used roughly the same first sentence for psicode and mpqc
   to make it clear that they do similar things, albeit with a slightly
   different target in mind, and then added a list of things they can
   do.  Again, editing them in some kind of wiki might be best, but not
   sure.  Unfortunately, the task overview pages do only allow for
   translating the description, not to send in improvements, maybe that
   could be a wishlist thing for them.

What do you think, is anybody interested in the one of the above?
Something else?  


cheers,

Michael