Debian-Science
Channel: DebConf Videos
Date: 2017-11-24

by Andreas Tille

At: DebConf8
http://penta.debconf.org/dc8_schedule/events/243.en.html
https://debconf8.debconf.org/

Turning Debian into the distribution of choice for scientists

The huge pool of packaged software inside Debian has the consequence
that it also contains a large number of software which is used in day
to day work of scientists.  But the pure fact that packages are
available is not enough to attract scientist who frequently tend to so
called "easy to install" distributions and just are not aware which
profit they might gain from Debian.  Debian-Science has the goal to
make Debian really attractive for scientists.

After a talk at DebConf 5 in Helsinki three years ago the
Debian-Science mailing list[1] was created and there is a Wiki
page[2].  It is basically about adding scientific FLOSS software to
the Debian package pool.  The more than six year experience in the
Debian-Med project has shown that just adding packages to the Debian
pool is nice but users deserve more than just packaged software.

Debian does a poor job in advertising the technically good job that is
done.  Many users do not have an idea about the available software
inside Debian featuring a high level of quality and robustness.  It is
observed quite often that scientists just choose a distribution that
claims to be "easy to use" and once they have got a nice shiny desktop
environment they start to compile the software they need for day to
day work from scratch.

So the task for a Debian-Science project is to make Debian the
distribution of choice for scientist which includes proper advertising
(i.e. listing software packages that are useful for scientific work),
reasonable preselection of packages, convey inter-package relations -
in short: Turning Debian into a scientific workbench that scientists
are keen on using.

From a technical point of view the Custom Debian Distribution
framework could be helpful to approach this goal.  It simplifies the
the task to care about scientific software inside Debian in an
organised manner.  Currently there is no structure in the scientific
packages inside Debian - they just exist.

In principle a general science CDD is probably not the best solution
and a more fine grained structure would do better.  The problem is
that in fact there is nobody who currently wants to do the grunt work
to actually do something into this direction.  There exist some
specific efforts for Chemistry and GIS related software but currently
except for Debian-Med which covers also all Biology related package
these are rather packaging teams than efforts to turn Debian into the
distribution of choice for Chemists and people who are working with
geographical information.

A Debian-Science CDD is about answering the questions:
 - Who will define a list of software that should be included into Debian
   to support a specific field of science even better?
 - Who will keep an eye on the bugs scientific software packages are
   gathering?
 - Is there any solid group maintenance and QA effort for scientists
   done by scientists inside Debian?


[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience

Room: Salon del mar
Scheduled start: 2008-08-15 18:00:00