On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 13:53, Daniel Leidert wrote: > Am Mittwoch, den 19.07.2006, 13:03 -0400 schrieb Kevin B. McCarty: > > [..] > > That reminds me of another question I had. Maybe it's too early to > > bring up but I'll ask it anyway. > > > > What would be the best way to organize the archive by section? The > > usual divisions "main contrib non-free" are fine for Debian, but one > > of the main reasons an unofficial repository is needed is the > > often-poor state of care to licenses in scientific software that makes > > them unsuitable for Debian's archive. Probably the only software in > > "main" in the repo would be either things undergoing testing on their > > way to the Debian official archive, or Free software that's too > > obscure to package for Debian. (I'm thinking of CERN's "patchy" as an > > example for the latter.) > > > > So I was thinking perhaps a division by field makes more sense - > > "analysis astronomy biology chemistry physics" etc. A typical > > sources.list line might then look something like > > > > deb http://www.debian-science.org/ physics analysis > > I heavily vote against this. > > > Maybe some packages could be made available under more than one field > > And this is the reason. It would make it more complicated to get or even > _find_ packages. > > > (e.g. ROOT under both physics and analysis)? After all, ROOT and > > (e.g.) PAW aren't intrinsically physics software (unlike say GEANT), > > they're just traditionally used by physicists. Comments? > > I really vote for using the main/contrib/non-free section model. This > would also help to see, which packages might be worth a try to get them > into Debian officially, which should be the goal in every case. >
An answer in this thread said, scientist often don't care about licenses. And often they are allowed to do so. Often applications have exceptions for non-commercial use or usage for research tasks. The latter is easily proven when working for an institute or university. As a conclusion, separating science applications into main/contrib/non-free does not make much sense in these cases. As scientist I can put the most into main. So a high level classification into something like libraries, plotting, visualisation, WEB, GUI, common, ... (only a collection of items as example) would be more appropriate I think. Kind Regards, Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]