[Debichem-devel] viewmol: /usr/bin/viewmol missing for most archs

[Andreas Tille]

[moving the subject to Debian Science + debichem list]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 06:05:42PM +1100, Drew Parsons wrote:
> I don't have a strong opinion on it.  Certainly viewmol does fit in
> perfectly with DebiChem, and so I don't really mind having it
> relocated.  

OK.
 
> I guess my more general feeling is that it could be better to have just
> the one Debian Science, such that the DebiChem folk become Debian
> Science members. (As a general comment, I'm not a fan of strict field
> specialisation. I prefer the title of "physical scientist" over
> "physicist" or "chemist"). 

I perfectly share your point of view from a scientists perspective.
However, from a package maintenance perspective I consider it better to
have some specialised teams.  A frequently issued criticisim about the
Debian Science team (seek for Matthias Klose here on Debian Science
mailing list archive for instance) is that the team is so large that
nobody really cares about single packages.  While I do not fully agree
to the criticism I admit that there is a point.  I consider the more
focussed teams of Debian Med (for biology) and Debian GIS as a quite
successful example for this.

It also needs to be said that there is no competition between these
teams who maintains what package.  For instance in Debian Med we are
maintaining insighttoolkit which is a 3D imaging library which is used
in medical imaging as well as in GIS for creating 3D graphical objects.
It has only historical reasons that the Debian Med team cares.  We also
have quite some share in Debian Med with DebiChem - this never has
caused any problem since a certain amount of developers is in both
teams.  We simply are profiting from some common knowledge.

> Then the identity of "Debian Chemistry" would be more a question of
> managing the science-chemistry package under the Debian Science
> umbrella, with the interested developers spending their time on this
> chemistry-oriented subset of Debian Science.

I'd rather prefer if the science-chemistry package would be basically
depending from debichem-* metapackages which would reduce the
maintenance effort.  The only reason why this currently is no good idea
is that the web sentinel does not yet have the feature to "resolve" such
metapackage dependencies and present the single packages on the tasks
page.  I plan to implement this in the (hopefully not so far) future.
 
> This is broader discussion than just the management of viewmol.  Why is
> DebiChem separate from Debian Science?  I'm sure it was discussed
> already, I should look up the mailing list archives :)

There are two reasons: First DebiChem is older than Debian Science and
second as I tried to explain above I'd consider it correct and it was
discussed here that Debian Science is rather an umbrella where smaller
Blends might be spring off from if a sufficient number of team members
arises.
 
Kind regards

      Andreas.

-- 
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