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

[Chris Walker]

Hi,

Michael Banck <mbanck at debian.org> writes:

> 
> 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).

This sounds like a good idea. 

Check packages tagged chemistry -
http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/tagindex/field%3A%3Achemistry.html

to see if you should add them. 

The wiki provides a good way for several people to categorise the
packages, but long term the tasks packages are probably the way to
go. What I don't like about the task packages is that they don't allow
you to create a page like the wiki is currently where programs with
similar function are grouped together.

> 
>  * 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.

I think this is an excellent idea - and wish more parts of Debian
would do this. Choice is a good thing, but a strong recommendation
that particular packages are better would be useful.

>   
>    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 ?

I intend to put the comments recently posted about symbolic maths
packages (yacas, axiom and Maxima) into the wiki somewhere. 

> 
>  * 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.

If you want to tag packages with tags that already exist, you can, and
should just get on with it at http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/. 

The difficulty I came up with when trying to add tags for pacakges, is
that I envisiged a list like
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuScience where all the abinitio
packages were in one place, matlab replacements in another and so
on. I couldn't work out how to do this with the existing tags.

> 
>  * 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.

You could always send a bug report if you don't like the English description.

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


Making sure all the packages have upstream homepage field would
perhaps be useful.

Chris