-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi, I would like to enquire whether someone would be interested in developing some kind of scientific software packaging initiative ?
I am a post-doc researcher in applied and computational math and I am using OpenIndiana on my workstation and personal computing nodes. To the question "Why ?", I would reply that it's mainly about having the possibility to setup a RAIDZ on the workstation and then benefiting from better data "safety" (few horror/corruption stories with ext3...), using snapshots for my data sets and results, as well as the possibility to rollback if a new version of numerical libraries breaks something (or even just an upgrade). Another good point is the good support of Nvidia graphic cards and the fact that something on the system is not breaking after every single upgrade... To this regard OpenIndiana is a very good working environment for a researcher. The main drawback is that it requires lots of "manual" installations which any researcher/engineer cannot afford. Before considering using optimized libraries, one is mainly concerned about just doing his research work :) As the compilation and upgrade of numerical libraries and application tends to be tedious and as I need to upgrade PETSc and friends, I am taking the time now to package any software I am using at work. I am currently packaging TeXLive, LaTeX Gedit plugin, Scilab, Paraview and linear algebra and PDE solver software which have been using in the past years. I am using pkgbuild and SFE and here is a link to a sandbox where I started pushing spec files I wrote this week: https://bitbucket.org/alarcher/oi-scientific/wiki/Home Related to this, I have then few questions: - - What can be a good way to collaborate on packaging scientific software ? - - Should we provide the packages through the OI SFE repository or a separate one ? Then how ? - - Should we focus on using GCC 4.6.3 provided by SFE ? (I personally don't have the time to handle SUNCC gotchas if any :S) - - Where should the "OI Scientific" project by hosted ? - - How should we handle dependencies to OI packages ? (for instance Ant from OI is too old for some software I am using). Moreover, if there are enough people interested I would advocate having a system similar to Debian Sciences with few maintainer per package and for each a separate repository with spec files, copyright, patches, etc... (something like Redmine ?). So if you are interested in a joint effort in that direction, I would be glad to hear you suggestions. Best regards, Aurélien -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJQr69qAAoJEA/MOW1tOCCga/8H/i6anp+u01ZtrcGRXymouxmv 5DodCaOUPMXsflEnRMnkmQnup7dPPoEBvMGOS1GtMeHzWIrQfATst5dxLyxetwNL zPX83g9ychjAq/8xaHMt/ADt0isjhGXoofKR0UAvzPyy5eXhbvIfB2wxVHe9e/GC zJbwAd984K5iAtEyp/AE7TpqGlx1Z1Tdt5aTyYs3BMxPSIEp7CUbjVecp/0kShoh UmnqErmpTUEe+cVRw9EV5R4LTpBDcdahNzcm0F2cogMbKxxMn2EgGeqHh8Jkd2I6 zvHp4ROUfkqE6x1Sfr4yzXHyMnw30Ul58ye5JUYOxChY2JRc5MFDhqbP3YZjkms= =nKLb -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
