[Neurodebian-users] NeuroFedora packaging priorities

[Morgan Hough]

Hey Yarik,

Good to hear from you too. If we are only going to meet in person every
15-20 years I think we need to wear those badges like high school reunions
with pictures of our younger, more idealistic selves:) Sorry for the delay
but living in the UK as foreign residents has its ups and downs with my
wife finishing grad school.

To your points. Well if you don’t mind me sometimes mailing the list about
upstream issues, I have a couple people working on neurodebian packages too
so it will be mostly relevant. For dsiStudio for instance, I am wondering
what we should do about the data that he doesn’t have bundled in his main
source project. It will be mostly things like that. I am still very
interested in the current status of a independent FreeSurfer build BTW.

I will definitely make datalad a priority. I think Igor will approve:) My
friend Simon has been running an IPFS node BTW. I will checkout popcon for
sure. I think mricron, mrtrix3, AFNI, MNI tools and ANTs cover a lot of
ground in terms of broad coverage with GPL/BSD tools. Interesting but not
surprising on the top results. Curious how much you de-emphasize Python
tools (NiPy projects), not denying their awesome merits, but just because
everyone pushes Anaconda and/or pip installable generic packaging.

Love to hear more about your FOSDEM plans. Happy to volunteer to help. I
think there are some HBP software/standards projects they would like to
also see more outside adoption too. I know at MozFest there are
non-scientists interested and motivated to help in ways they can with
projects. That’s certainly what I am trying to learn from Mozilla Fellows.
If we can find the right engagement, I think there are people out there
interested. Separately from NeuroFedora, I am trying to do more with
make/hackaday hardware crowd and find projects that solve their problems
like LSL that might get them more engaged. Still digging.

Talk more soon. Hope to see you again soon (maybe January in Florida this
time?)

Cheers,

-Morgan

On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 5:09 AM Yaroslav Halchenko <debian at onerussian.com>
wrote:

>
> On Sun, 11 Nov 2018, Morgan Hough wrote:
>
> >    Hi Yarik/Michael/All,
>
> Hi Morgan!  Long time no hear!
>
> >    Ankur Sinha recently resurrected NeuroFedora and as he is a
> computational
> >    neuroscientist, he has been focused on packaging NEST, Brian, etc.
> Igor
> >    Gnatenko and I previous used a shared Google Doc with packages drawn
> from
> >    NeuroDebian and the web that seemed to fit the criteria for inclusion
> but
> >    it needs to be updated and before I did that I wanted to get in touch
> >    about a couple of things.Â
> >    1) Is there still neurodebian-upstream list that would maybe be
> >    appropriate for sharing info on common upstream packaging/licensing
> >    problems?
>
> With the migration of the "non-official" lists server in Debian, we
> didn't bother moving -upstream and -devel since they were too low volume
> thus I think ATM we have only neurodebian-users:
> https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo
>
> >    2) Is there an up-to-date list of the most widely installed packages
> from
> >    NeuroDebian that we can use to prioritize our RPM packaging efforts
> with
> >    sought after neuroimaging packages?
>
> DataLad (and datalad-containers and datalad-neuroimaging) should go
> first! ;)   would need fresh git-annex
>
> on a (more) serious note: I guess checkout neurodebian popcon
> http://neuro.debian.net/popcon/
> so you could get e.g. those pkgs which we provide sorted by installation
> count:
>
> $> wget -O - -q http://neuro.debian.net/popcon/by_inst | grep -v 'Not in
> sid' | head -n 40
> #Format
> #
> #<name> is the package name;
> #<inst> is the number of people who installed this package;
> #<vote> is the number of people who use this package regularly;
> #<old> is the number of people who installed, but don't use this package
> #      regularly;
> #<recent> is the number of people who upgraded this package recently;
> #<no-files> is the number of people whose entry didn't contain enough
> #           information (atime and ctime were 0).
> #rank name                            inst  vote   old recent no-files
> (maintainer)
> 116   neurodebian-popularity-contest   932   742   146    44     0
> (Neurodebian Maintainers)
> 224   python-pkg-resources             886   350   498    32     6
> (Neurodebian Maintainers)
> 392   libjs-jquery                     812   134   251    34   393 (Debian
> Javascript Maintainers)
> 404   init-system-helpers              806   392   393    19     2
> (Neurodebian Maintainers)
> 455   python-six                       791   174   488   118    11
> (Neurodebian Maintainers)
> 569   p7zip-full                       757   289   447    21     0
> (Neurodebian Maintainers)
> 627   python3-pkg-resources            745   273   441    31     0
> (Neurodebian Maintainers)
> 692   python-setuptools                730   250   442    31     7
> (Neurodebian Maintainers)
> 722   python3-six                      723   126   524    69     4
> (Neurodebian Maintainers)
> 815   python-tz                        698    58   611    28     1
> (Neurodebian Maintainers)
> 1012  p7zip                            643   266   357    20     0
> (Neurodebian Maintainers)
> 1027  python-urllib3                   639    66   512    56     5
> (Neurodebian Maintainers)
> ...
>
> which shows that "most popular" aren't neuroscience ones, but you could
> find the ones of interest below in there.
>
>
> >    3) I would certainly be interested in learning about venues that have
> been
> >    useful to present NeuroDebian to those outside the neuroimaging
> community
> >    (FOSDEM, MozFest, etc.) as well as any interest in sharing booth
> >    space/fees/costs/resources/labor for such opportunities. As a regular
> >    neurodebian user myself, I would be very proud to represent
> NeuroDebian at
> >    some of the most recent open source/open science conferences I have
> >    attended.
>
> Well -- we kinda suck at promotion outside of the field.  We are
> contemplating
> though presence at the next FOSDEM but primarily not for NeuroDebian but
> for
> DataLad project, which although with the roots in neuroscience, has little
> to
> nothing neuroscience specific in it.  So we really need to promote it
> beyond
> neuroimaging and neuroscience community.
>
> Promoting NeuroDebian outside of Neuroscience community might be a bit
> futile I
> guess ;-)  After all it is NEURO Debian, even though we indeed
> package/support
> some generic projects, accent is neuro- stuff, and those generic ones are
> probably largely from python land, and that is where ppl often just resort
> to
> conda.
>
> >    Finally, I don't know what support NeuroDebian currently receives for
> >    efforts outside neuroimaging research but if it is within my budget I
> >    would match that to include NeuroFedora. Happy to do that through/with
> >    INCF or however others see fit. I only want this to be a contribution
> and
> >    net benefit in terms of relations with other projects such as
> NeuroDebian.
> >    I would certainly like to learn how I can help NeuroFedora perhaps
> benefit
> >    from research funding as well but as the new kid on the block mainly
> just
> >    looking for advice to get started providing a service that others will
> >    benefit from now.
>
> Eh... we scored 3 "non awarded" proposals  to both NIH and NSF where we
> sought
> for direct support/development for NeuroDebian.  It was always a matter of
> 1
> reviewer saying smth like "oh well, this packaging stuff is not as
> important as
> development of new methodologies!" which kills the average score.  So we
> gave
> up looking for dedicated funds for sustained funding... ATM we sustain
> NeuroDebian only via side-efforts within e.g. DataLad (funding is over),
> ReproNim projects, and also thanks to support via consulting agreement
> with the
> NIH funded NITRC.  Also placing packages under joint maintenance with
> Debian
> Med and Science (and other) teams helps at times, although at other times
> involves just fixing up packaging so it backports easily, but I think it
> mostly
> helps ;-)
>
>
> >    Thanks for your time, and as always, thank you for your inspiring
> project
> >    and community.
>
> Thank you Morgan for your kind words and good luck with NeuroFedora effort!
> --
> Yaroslav O. Halchenko
> Center for Open Neuroscience     http://centerforopenneuroscience.org
> Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
> Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834                       Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
> WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/neurodebian-users/attachments/20181116/74ea65e6/attachment.html>