[gentoo-science] Scientific Gentoo reorg

[gentoo-science] Scientific Gentoo reorg

[George Shapovalov]

Hi everybody.

Sorry for crossposting, but many people whom I want to catch with this are not 
on gentoo-science. For the same reason lets keep this initial discussion 
here, on -dev. If we need to expand, lets take it to the gentoo-science, but 
then I would expect everybody interested to sign up ;).

Gentoo Science has been relatively quiet, even though we are making a steady 
progress on many fronts, but lately a few things has caught my attention and 
I think we can do better if create a bit more structure.

At present we count 10 categories containing 309 packages (wow! Considering 
that it all started with some 20 packages I put in sci back when we did not 
have a two-tier categories yet, quite impressive :)). However looking at 
herds.xml I see only 10 devs listed, which just cannot be true (considering, 
according to my experience with bugzilla, that majority of these packages are 
actually maintained). The real situation is that many devs are quietly 
supporting their own packages but are reluctant to join the sci team 
officially. And it is this situation that I want to address.

I see one reasonable rationale for this relctance to join: people are 
afraid "to get too much on theirs hands" by signing up. In reality the 
gentoo-science mailing list is really low on traffic (quite a relief in 
present times ;)), but nonetheless the sheer amount of packages may be 
frightening. Therefore I am proposing to recognize the fact that we 
(Scientific Gentoo project) became big and act accordingly:

1. We need more herds. The easiest possibility is to simply split them 
accordingly to categories. However, with 10 categories, this may be an 
overkill, or, with some categories having >50 packages an underkill, or 
simply may not correspond to maintenance reality (it will definitely fail on 
sci-libs for example). It is hard to tell without seing who does what, so I 
am going to ask for some feedback here (see below).

2. Should we create some subprojects? This really will have to be discussed in 
more detail when people respond and join corresponding teams I guess. 
However, while at it we may as well become a top-level project of our own. 
Right now Scientific Gentoo is under Dektop, which is at the very least 
strange (but all the other options back then were even less fitting..)

3. Mail aliases. Right now we have sci@g.o, which we should keep as an all 
encompassing alias for announcements or, well, I am not sure yet what else, 
but time will tell. In addition we should create new ones, one per herd. If 
by chance there are people interested in seeing *all* the bugs (which I 
somehow doubt, but theoretically?), we can reuse sci@g.o for that as well..

So, right now I would like to ask for the feedback on the following:

Q1) I would like to hear about the reasons why people are afraid to join the 
sci team. You may respond to me personally or raise it on the list, but 
please let me/us know about the problems in any case, so that we may address 
them!

Q2) Please let me know if you are supporting or occasionally touching some 
package under sci-* and, assuming we create more herds, which herd it should 
belong to (just make it up as you see fit right now) and whether you would be 
willing to add yourself to the alias of that herd or join some subteam if we 
create one. I will collect the responces and then compile a proposal for the 
new structure.

Q3) Not relevant to this restructuring, but always usefull: if you know of 
some package that you think should really go under sci-something, please let 
us know!

And to finish it all up :)
Q4) If you are a user but would like to be involved more actively, or you have 
to run that particular package for your work but it sits in bugzilla for ages 
and no developer seems sensible enough to take it up, please let us know too. 
Best of all - subscribe to that gentoo-scie mailing list and ask somebody to 
mentor you. By the time it will be over we should have a new structure, so 
you won't end up with the whole 300+ sci packages on your hands (this was 
holding some people with whom I discussed it too).

This should be enough to start with, so, bring it on! :)

George
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Re: [gentoo-science] Scientific Gentoo reorg

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

George Shapovalov wrote:
> So, right now I would like to ask for the feedback on the following:
>
> Q1) I would like to hear about the reasons why people are afraid to join the 
> sci team. You may respond to me personally or raise it on the list, but 
> please let me/us know about the problems in any case, so that we may address 
> them!
>   
Not so much afraid as spread too thin between my day job and hobby
computing. I just wouldn't be able to fill a role beyond tester without
giving up something else I really love to do. :)
> Q2) Please let me know if you are supporting or occasionally touching some 
> package under sci-* and, assuming we create more herds, which herd it should 
> belong to (just make it up as you see fit right now) and whether you would be 
> willing to add yourself to the alias of that herd or join some subteam if we 
> create one. I will collect the responces and then compile a proposal for the 
> new structure.
>   
I have some ideas for breaking up the larger chunks. For example,
"sci-mathematics" could be broken into symbolic and numeric, the latter
picking up "blas-atlas" and "lapack-atlas". I'd move everything from
sci-libs into its functional area ... blas-atlas and lapack-atlas to
math/numeric, , the graphics libraries to sci-visualization, etc.
> Q3) Not relevant to this restructuring, but always usefull: if you know of 
> some package that you think should really go under sci-something, please let 
> us know!
>   
Everything I use actively is there already, plus a lot of stuff I have
no interest in. There are a couple of Markov modeling packages I'd like
to see that are in pretty good shape -- PRISM from
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~dxp/prism/ and PEPA Workbench from
ttp://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s9905941/jPEPA/. Neil Gunther's "PDQ"
(http://www.perfdynamics.com/Tools/PDQcode.html) would be a nice
addition. A good open-source discrete event simulator would be nice. The
most popular seems to be C++SIM (http://cxxsim.ncl.ac.uk/)
> And to finish it all up :)
> Q4) If you are a user but would like to be involved more actively, or you have 
> to run that particular package for your work but it sits in bugzilla for ages 
> and no developer seems sensible enough to take it up, please let us know too. 
>   
Yeah, but see Q1 :).

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com

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Re: [gentoo-science] Scientific Gentoo reorg

[Donnie Berkholz]

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M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> I have some ideas for breaking up the larger chunks. For example,
> "sci-mathematics" could be broken into symbolic and numeric, the latter
> picking up "blas-atlas" and "lapack-atlas". I'd move everything from
> sci-libs into its functional area ... blas-atlas and lapack-atlas to
> math/numeric, , the graphics libraries to sci-visualization, etc.

[Removed gentoo-dev from CC]

The point of splitting off libs into separate categories is so that
categories are easier to browse for end-user applications without
getting drowned in random libraries and other dependencies. This is very
useful to me.

Thanks,
Donnie


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Re: [gentoo-science] Scientific Gentoo reorg

[C Y]

--- George Shapovalov <george@gentoo.org> wrote:

> 
> So, right now I would like to ask for the feedback on the following:

[snip - too far out of the loop right now to have a useful opinion :-(]

> Q3) Not relevant to this restructuring, but always usefull: if you
> know of some package that you think should really go under sci-
> something, please let us know!

Unfortunately I am not really in a good position to comment - my gentoo
box (my only home computer) has been of the net for many months and I
am so far behind on current trends it is scary.  In the past I have
been involved with the Maxima, Axiom, and BRL-CAD ebuilds.  The latter
should be in a sci-cad categorization if one doesn't exist yet (I know,
I know - not much CAD on Linux.  Still, I'd call it a very logical
category.  I think there are a couple more out there somewhere besides
QCAD and BRL-CAD, and I think I may have even listed them somewhere... 
SALOME comes echoing back out of the mists to me as something that
might be interesting.)  As for Axiom and Maxima (along with the
wxmaxima GUI) they belong in sci-symbolic or maybe sci-symbolicmath (I
wish it could be sci-math-symbolic, which is also the google newsgroup
name, but I'm sure that violates some naming rule).

A general question I would like to put to the sci list - there exist a
significant number of programs which might be catagorized as proof
software (there are several subtypes) and are freely available.  I have
wanted to see these in Gentoo for quite a while (nor am I alone - I see
a bug requesting the HOL theorem proof assistant from 2004) but I don't
know if there even exists a category for this type of program.  Would
it be sci?  Perhaps sci-computer?  I think there have not been a flood
of ebuilds for these programs because as a rule they tend to be
difficult to build (for some reason they don't usually follow the
normal configure-make-make_install procedure we all know and love) but
they are exceedingly powerful and I think their inclusion in Gentoo
would be a Good Thing.

A particular focus of interest is Isabelle:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/HVG/Isabelle/

I attempted to build this once but met with complete failure - perhaps
after I get back on the net I can try to figure it out again.

Cheers,
CY

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Re: [gentoo-science] Scientific Gentoo reorg

[Justin R Findlay]

On Sat, Jun 17, 2006 at 07:57:46PM -0700, C Y wrote:
> I know - not much CAD on Linux.  Still, I'd call it a very logical
> category.  I think there are a couple more out there somewhere besides
> QCAD and BRL-CAD, and I think I may have even listed them somewhere...

There's pythoncad.

http://www.pythoncad.org/


Justin
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Re: [gentoo-science] Scientific Gentoo reorg

[Jan Marten Simons]

Am Samstag, 17. Juni 2006 19:25 schrieb George Shapovalov:
> Hi everybody.
>
[...]
> Q1) I would like to hear about the reasons why people are afraid to join
> the sci team. You may respond to me personally or raise it on the list, but
> please let me/us know about the problems in any case, so that we may
> address them!

First I'd like to state that I'm mostly interested in crystallographic and 
plotting software. I've submitted some ebuilds to bugzilla, but as demands 
from work change quite frequently I don't know if I could guarantee reliable 
maintenance over larger periods of time. Then I'm still looking for a good 
eclass intro doc, that briefly explains which eclasses are there, what 
functions those provide and how one could use them (examples) to enhance 
ebuilds. 

> Q2) Please let me know if you are supporting or occasionally touching some
> package under sci-* and, assuming we create more herds, which herd it
> should belong to (just make it up as you see fit right now) and whether you
> would be willing to add yourself to the alias of that herd or join some
> subteam if we create one. I will collect the responces and then compile a
> proposal for the new structure.

Some packages (shelx, platon, ortep3, maid, eden, cns, DrawXTL, Jana2000, 
sginfo, more to come) could be moved from sci-chemistry into a new 
sci-crystallography subfolder. I'd opt in to keep an eye on those (read: to 
do basic testing and help the maintainer with debugging). Proxy maintaining 
(or overlay indirection) might be OK with me, too.

> Q3) Not relevant to this restructuring, but always usefull: if you know of
> some package that you think should really go under sci-something, please
> let us know!
I'm still missing these:
DrawXTL (Versions 4 and 5) V4 is the command line version, V5 features a GUI
Jana2000
sginfo
euhedral (I'm working on an ebuild for this)
I submitted ebuilds for those to bugzilla (IDs: 77969, 80464, 116142) and 
would like to get feedback on those.

With regards,
Jan
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[gentoo-science] Re: [gentoo-dev] Scientific Gentoo reorg

[Flammie Pirinen]

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2006-06-17, George Shapovalov sanoi, jotta:

> Q3) Not relevant to this restructuring, but always usefull: if you
> know of some package that you think should really go under
> sci-something, please let us know!
> 
> And to finish it all up :)
> Q4) If you are a user but would like to be involved more actively, or
> you have to run that particular package for your work but it sits in
> bugzilla for ages and no developer seems sensible enough to take it
> up, please let us know too. Best of all - subscribe to that
> gentoo-scie mailing list and ask somebody to mentor you. 

I’ve suggested this before, but I could easily adopt the few phonetics
and linguistics software I use regularly (such as praat
<http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78392>), if there’s someone
with spare time to do the mentoring.

-- 
Flammie, Gentoo Linux Documentation’s Finnish head translator
and FlameEyes’ bot <http://dev.gentoo.org/~flammie>.

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