[Debichem-devel] Metapackages for DebiChem?

[Michael Banck]

Hi,

thanks Andreas for pushing this/us.

On Fri, Jul 09, 2010 at 12:37:38PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> as some people here on this list might know I have prepared tasks files
> for DebiChem[1] which are rendered into so called tasks pages[2] and
> bugs pages[3] which you hopefully like for your comfort in maintaining
> chemestry related packages in Debian.
> 
> Because I'm not e chemist I have done the categorisation with the help
> of Michael Banck, but I know more work has to be done to include all
> relevant packages.  For example massxpert is missing from this list and
> probably more.  Moreover I have no idea how you will like the way
> of categorisation and the according descriptions.
> 
> I wonder whether you might like to give me some input on this (patches
> to the tasks files or even unformatted comments are fine) and whether it
> might make sense to also generate some metapackages which can be used to
> simplify the installation of chemical software easily on a Debian
> machine.

I think the categorization is quite fine (although I am not totally sure
I agree on the merging of 3d viewers and visualization - at least the
name "Output & visualization" looks wrong to me), the description could
need some editing which I might get to (or not...).

The central question IMO is whether we want to expose all of the
Debichem (and related) packages via meta-packages, or select/deselect
some based on what we think it most useful to our users.  It would be
nice if those great web pages could list them all, while the
meta-packages would only install the ones we can totally recommend
(sometimes, there are several packages which almost the same feature set
and some of them might be abandoned upstream or slightly buggy).

Also, it begs the question whether we could/should select a couple of
applications we think every chemist interested in Debichem should have;
would something like that (maybe a general "Debichem" task) be possible?


Michael