Hi, when I had my talk about Debian-Science at LSM in Amiens:
http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200707_lsm_science the discussion brought up some intersting points that might be interesting for all CDDs Jannick Patois proposed a categorisation of quality. It might be reasonable to find simple objective numbers. Here is a summary of Jannick's points (with some additions and hints from myself): - number of users (could be obtained from popularity contest) - number of lines of codes (could be calculated at package building time) - version number (obvious, but should be put on a general stats page) - number of authors / written by a credited institute / used in publications --> duty of documentation of the maintainer - date of last version --> duty of documentation of the maintainer - number of related mailing list and frequency of postings There are several possibilities to store this information that might give users a clue about the value of a certain package. Probably the best way would be a tag in the control file but this will probably not be accepted soon. Perhaps a first shot could be a section in README.Debian of the package. Something, that leaded into this direction is Francescos DebianGis Thermometer under http://pkg-grass.alioth.debian.org/debiangis-status.html Francesco, where can the code for this can be found? I would regard this a s a really valuable tool for all Custom Debian Distributions. Regarding the categorsiation of avialable Debian packages I decided to just add the missing things to my original slides from the talk. These now do contain some additions for geography and several additions to physics (compared to the slided I used in the talk). The slides are available at http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200707_lsm_science/index_en.html (If you want to read the LaTeX source have a look at http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200707_lsm_science/science.tex but note the hints at http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/latex-beamer/index_en.html if you want to compile these yourself. I rather linked the source here for enabling easy cut and paste the dependencies with a text editor instead of wanting you to compile it yourself). This categorisation is kind of a second step to realise meta packages stuff as it was discussed in the thread that started at http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2007/02/msg00011.html and which ended in a classification Wiki page at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScienceClassification The idea is that somebody might clean up the wiki page and adds the suggested Depends/Recommends/Suggests to the categories mentioned there. Please don't hesitate to start with this task if you are interested because this would lead to the needed double checking of my suggestion and brings Debian-Science foreward while I'm completely busy with urgend Debian-Med stuff for the next couple of weeks. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
