Re: [gentoo-science] sci team help

[Jukka Ruohonen <drear@iki.fi>]

> > Who will decide which packages are first-class citizens and which are not? 
> > What are the criteria?
> 
> I suggested a few.
> 	- Is a developer willing to commit to maintaining it?
> 	- Is it expected to be fairly popular, or is it extremely specific?
> 	- (for apps already in the tree) Is it unmaintained? Should it be 
> 		moved to an overlay?

The first criteria is naturally a prerequisite for any package. But I also share the 
concerns raised by Andrey.

Somehow, I feel, personally, that the sci-packages should constitute an exception 
from the general rules regarding overlays. I mean that when a person chooses to use 
something from, say, Xfce overlay, the use of an overlay is rather natural and 
pleasant, but when a person is "forced" to use an overlay in order to write a Ph.D 
thesis, the use of an overlay can be far from pleasant. In my opinion overlays can 
not escape additional concerns regarding quality and trust, and these concerns are 
much more strongly felt when we are dealing with scientific packages. Again the 
keyword may just be the perception.

And as Sébastien mentioned, this is an area in which the build process and runtime 
behavior should be rock solid, the former preferably being accompanied by as many 
tests as is possible. Do not get me wrong: all packages that I have used from the 
sci-overlay have been high-quality ones, but for the mentioned reasons I see no 
point in having an overlay that possibly (would? will?) contain unmaintained ebuilds 
with little or no testing. Again I see this as an issue specifically related to the 
scientific packages.

Also, given that we are dealing with scientific software, the minority of the 
packages will fall under the "generic and popular" category, while the rest will 
surely be more or less specific. I see that we have eleven sci-categories in the 
main tree. Most likely packages in sci-electronics will be extremely specific for 
people doing work with packages in the sci-geosciences category. I doubt that 
popularity is such a good criteria in choosing which scientific packages deserve to 
be in the main tree. I would rather like to ask what kind of internal representation 
the sci team has? Are the staffing needs especially bad in some areas?

Again these were just small and perhaps irrelevant opinions from an user of the 
scientific packages.

Thanks,

Jukka Ruohonen.

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