Hello, here a first draft for an email that I considered to write to the bioinformatics conference contact at IBM. Andreas I would like to co-sign it and also Charles for both their feedback and to get the message across that we are a community. Nelson, Thijs?
Questions: * while intending to keep is short I happily accept ideas for improving the letter * should we spike the Debian-Med main page with a reference to the Debian-Med Wiki page? Steffen Dear ..., we met at the ISMB in Vienna where I learned a lot about your PowerPC-Cell platform and took the opportunity to introduce you to the Debian Linux Bioinformatics community. I asked for the possibility to grant access to such a machine to developers for the Debian community to promote that platform. We agreed that it might be mutually beneficial to such establish closer ties with the Debian community and, if you are still interested, I can only offer to help evaluating possible routes to implement these. There is a second not unrelated issue in which I perceive you as a potential ally. The developers from the Debian-Med community (http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/index.de.html) become increasingly aware that for their Bioinformatics support the next strategic move is the integration of public data with to the already available software. The frequent updates of the data paired with the considerable size of the data however prohibits their distribution via regular Debian channels and its mirrors. Furthermore, the indexing of data needs to be performed in strict synchronicity with the data and is considerably time consuming. To have such files available as Debian packages would solve these issues. May I bluntly ask if you would be prepared to help with a (non backuped) server for a community project that is addressing the provisioning of bioinformatics data packages for Debian Linux? Maybe on a Cell-based machine? Some side thoughts: Bioinformatics Debian may experience a further boost with the advent of the BOSC liveCD (http://open-bio.org/wiki/BOSC/liveCD) which will be based on Debian. If essential bioinforamtics data can be seemlessly collected into packages, then a general acceptance of those may be beneficial for the local evaluation of scripts prior to the submission to deep computing facilities or grid computing in general. Best regards <whoever wants to contribute> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
