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

[Drew Parsons]

On Tue, 2014-11-11 at 10:39 +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> [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.

That's a fair point. It's an example of the tragedy of the commons.
Especially when we'll all so busy with our day jobs, under the larger
umbrella there's the temptation to think "someone else will take care of
it".

> 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.

True too. It doesn't have to be an either/or tribalism.

> > 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.

I see - some technical reasons too.

> > 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.

In those terms it makes sense for Debian Science to handle the lonely
science-related packages that don't have a more focussed home.  I'm
happy then for viewmol to be handled under DebiChem.

Drew