Hi Science packagers, Some time ago, there was a small discussion between me and Julian Taylor about the packaging of a special package [1], which was also forwarded to this list.
However, I would like to re-start this discussion now and get some more opinions since the problem may exist for a couple of scientific software packages: The European Southern Observatory runs one telescope (VLT) in Chile which uses several "instruments" (camera, spectrograph etc.) to get the data. The data processing for these instruments is very specific and is done in so-called "pipelines", from which about 20 exist [2]. Their structure is quite similar, so once the first pipeline is packaged, the rest doesn't require much effort. The dependencies of the pipelines are already packaged in Debian. However, there is one critics, that was brought up by Julian: every pipeline can be used only for one specific instrument on this unique telescope. If one doesn't have observational data from the VLT for that specific instrument, the pipeline is worthless. And usually all observations are done by a specific request of a scientist to fullfill his needs. On the other hand, these data become freely available for everyone [3], allowing (and ecouraging) the scientific re-use by the whole community. Especially for scientists without direct access to the telescope, this is an excellent opportunity for scientific work. I think that this perfectly fits into the best goals of the "Debian ethics". Typically, binary packages of the pipeline code would have a footstamp of <~ 1MB. However, the pipelines are usually accompanied with a calibration data set, whose size ranges from some 100 kB to ~100 MB. The calibration files are needed to actually run the pipeline with some scientific result. I think it would be in any case too much to put all these data onto Debian mirrors, just for the few astronomers out there. So, having a package that downloads and installs the calibration data would be the best here, right? But this would make the packages no longer self-contained. Would that be a legal problem for a Debian package in main? What do you think: is it worth to upload these "pipeline" packages to Debian? Or is it better to keep them in some personal repository? Best regards Ole [1] http://bugs.debian.org/709330 [2] http://www.eso.org/sci/software/pipelines/ [3] http://www.eso.org/UserPortal -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
