[Debichem-devel] Metapackages for DebiChem?

[Andreas Tille]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 08:01:43PM +0200, Michael Banck wrote:
> Personally, I do not about anything special pertaining chemistry here -
> I saw there is a "Debian Med Typesetting" task, but I wonder what is
> special about it.

It just has some packages which support for biologists and why not
assembling these in a metapackage.  We just want to support any task a
biologist needs to do.  If it is writing papers and there is something
which is specifically designed for this - why not putting it into the
metapackages.  Nobody will force you to install the metapackage but in
the sense of providing an installer DVD (or live DVD) it might not harm
if it contains such useful stuff.  Debian Edu is going even further and
has metapackages for desktop environmens like KDE, Gnome or Xfce.  If it
makes sense for some reason - why not.  I do not see any preference for
a certain desktop environment and thus we do not provide such
metapackages.  But for instance in the case of Debian Accessibility it
might make some sense if the Blends team has knowledge about what
desktop system works better for visibly impaired people.
 
> I think it would make more sense to have a few general baseline science
> tasks which cover data manipulation/plotting and typesetting (and
> perhaps others I have missed now) and which can be included by the
> various fields so their users see them.

That's fine.  As I said:  You need to find out what might fit your user
interests best.  If nobody asks for a debichem-typesetting there is no
need to provide it.  You will see that the design of metapackages will
change over time and will adapt to users needs.

Kind regards

     Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de