Kevin B. McCarty wrote:
Dear list,

Currently there are a fair number of repositories of science-related
unofficial Debian packages out there.  I've been thinking that it might
make sense to consolidate them into a single site.  This would have
several advantages:

- Permit convenient one-stop "shopping" for unofficial scientific .debs
with only one sources.list entry (well, two counting deb-src)

- Better PR for the unofficial .debs.  Instead of a dozen different
unofficial repositories, now only one would need to be publicized,
perhaps with an obvious name like "www.debian-science.org".

- Possibility of more complicated dependency graphs between unofficial
packages

- Possibility (someday) to set up a buildd network that can autobuild
all the packages for various architectures

- Testbed for packages that ultimately can enter Debian proper

- Convenient unofficial source for packages that can't enter Debian, for
whatever reason, as long as the maintainers had permission to distribute
them

I was talking to Brett Viren about the possibility to host CLHEP and
GEANT4 .debs at his site, maintaining a repository for unofficial
physics related packages.  So the question is, would other Debian
Scientists, in fields other than physics, also be interested in using
this repository?

The idea needs a lot of setup so probably not much will happen
immediately; this email is mainly to gauge the amount of interest.

An easier way might be just to make a web page that has all the
necessary sources.list lines for all the known repositories, so
the user can just paste them into their sources.list and apt-get update.
If the page was a wiki, newly found repositories could be added easily.

Another way would be to make a debian package that updates your sources.list
with new sources.list lines for unofficial repositories. That way, you could
do: apt-get install debian-science, and the package installation script will
run apt-get update for you.


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