Hi Andreas, Thanks for finding time to reply to my worries.
On 2021-11-01 16:19, Andreas Tille wrote: > 1. Another "one-man" team > I think Ole gave a good answer here: Its not about creating a > one-man team but rather attract more people to the team - from > inside and outside Debian. For those who have any doubt that this > can work: There are 23 people who confirmed, that they became > DDs *because* Debian Med exists[4]. Debian Med is now nearly > 20 years old. I would love if Debian Math would beat Debian Med > in attracting new developers. (Andrius, you even belong to this > set. ;-) ) It is true that I am among these 23 :) My reason for being in the list is mostly pragmatical: it was Debian Med people who signed my key and advocated me to become a DD, and for this I am very grateful. I believe being very open and very friendly to newcomers is one of the strongest sides of Debian Med. > Those 20 years when the Debian Med project have teached me that > it is very important to advertise the fact to the world that Debian > is targeting specific fields of science and IMHO mathematics is > a) well worth to be advertised > b) has lots of technically competent people beeing potential DDs > > 2. Further fragmentation of debian-science > I do not think that another Blend will lead to fragmentation of > Debian Science. Sure, some mathematics related packages will be > moved sooner or later but I personally can not see in how far > this might weaken Debian Science. I personally see also additional > contributors for Debian Science once more mathematicans might > join Debian (as I'm very positive about). > > Am Sat, Oct 30, 2021 at 06:18:28PM +0530 schrieb Nilesh Patra: >> Hi Andrius, >> >> Thanks for replying. See below :- >> >> On Sat, Oct 30, 2021 at 10:33:02AM +0300, Andrius Merkys wrote: I am skipping most of your replies to Nilesh's response to my mail. I ACK the skipped parts. >>> Furthermore, from my experience one does not need domain >>> knowledge to successfully package and maintain packages in Debian. >>> What makes more sense to me, is organizing packages into teams based on >>> programming languages and build/test systems, as such teams indeed >>> possess specific knowledge. I think most of the mails asking for help in >>> debian-med concern language and build system problems, not >>> domain-specific issues. >> >> I'm sorry, but I have to admit this argument of yours is sloppy, Andrius. >> By this logic, we could push entire debian-med python packages into >> python-team, >> java packages into java-team and so on... > > While this would work in principle the point of creating a Blend is to > attract experts who know the algorithm and internals of a certain > software to craft sensible packages and enable thorough testing. This > is usually not simply a programming language issue. In Debian Med we > have several upstreams maintaining their software as Debian packages > (after sufficient teaching of the packaging process and for sure > sponsored by a DD). IMHO exactly this is the strength of the Blends > concept to pair experts of the software with packaging experts. Even > better if this can be completed to involve users into that effort which > does not (yet) work as good as expected (but this has IMHO more external > reasons which we can hardly solve). I see your point. However I am not entirely convinced that teams are essential here. Maybe separate mailing lists could be enough? In the end upstreams mostly work on one-two source packages, and even if they become DMs they do not get push/upload permissions for all source packages of a team, do they? Domain-specific mailing lists could indeed be a go-to place for newcomers, those in need of help with packaging and sponsoring and so on. >>> I am worried reading about R packages being moved from debian-r to new >>> debian-math. I am afraid doing so might negatively impact their quality. >> >> You are right in your worries, but I have some statistics to present here. >> See here[1] or more specifically, look here[2,3] > > I'm not worried about moving R packages to some other Blend. It has > turned out to be a good idea to move all R packages from Debian Science, > Debian Med Debichem and possibly others into one language specific team. > However, this had happened since R packages are extremely uniform and > usually come with test suites that can be re-used which to some extend > is taking over the role of an expert knowing the software. There are > also not really any specific decisions to make about the packaging since > everything is really straightforward. > > This is absolutely different to software written in Python, Java or > anything else. I disagree. I find at least JavaScript and Perl packages quite uniform, and I have an impression that at least Perl packages outside the Debian Perl Team are generally in poorer shape than those inside the team. >> The number of pure math software in R package team is in no way overflowing, >> so I really think this should >> be manageable. The probability of it having a bit-rot will be less -- >> atleast not high with me, Andreas, Doug et. al. >> being around. >> >> However if you very strongly feel about it, we could leave the R packages >> where they are and continue maintaining >> them under R package umbrella. > > I'd say any Debian Math member who is interested in R packages should > simply join pkg-r team and be done. Agree. >> [1]: http://blends.debian.net/liststats/ >> [2]: http://blends.debian.net/liststats/uploaders_r-pkg.png >> [3]: http://blends.debian.net/liststats/commitstat_pkg-r.png > > [4] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Developers Thanks again for discussing this with me! Cheers, Andrius
