Dear Russ, Debian Med Team, Charles! (Please keep Tobias Hamp in replies.)
@Russ: Please allow me to include you in a discussion about a few bioinformatics packages that depend on big, but free data [2]. I have cited your opinion [3] in this discussion before. You are on the technical committee and on the policy team, so you, together with Charles, can help substantially here. [2] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-med-packaging/2013-April/thread.html [3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2013/03/msg00279.html This email is to continue the discussion about free packages that depend on big (e.g. >400MB) free data outside 'main'. These packages apparently violate policy 2.2.1 [0] for inclusion in 'main' because they require software outside the 'main' area to function. They do not violate point #1 of the social contract [1], which requires non-dependency on non-free components. For these big data packages, policy seems to be overly restrictive compared to the social contract, leading to seemingly unfounded rejection from 'main'. [0] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html [1] http://www.debian.org/social_contract * In case the social contract indeed allows such packages to be in 'main' (and policy is overly restrictive), how could it be ensured that the packages are accepted? * What is the procedure within Debian to elicit a decision about the handling of such packages in terms of archive area? Discussion on d-devel, followed by policy change? Asking the policy team to clarify policy for such packages? Technical committee? + Charles suggested such packages could go into 'main' [4], with a clear indication of the large data dependency of the package in the long description. When possible, providing the scripts for generating the large data as well. [4] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-med-packaging/2013-April/019292.html My goal as a Debian Developer and a packager is to get packages into Debian (so 'main') that are allowed in there, in reasonably short time. I would like to resolve this issue properly, because I believe it may pop up more often in bioinformatics software. For example, imagine a protein folding tool that would require a very large database to search for homologues for contact prediction, and using the contacts it would predict protein three-dimensional structure. This has been done before [5], and such a tool would be (is) immensely useful for bioinformatics. This tool would depend on gigabytes of data we would not package. Yet, by all means, I would want the tool to be part of the distribution. [5] http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0028766 Thank you for your opinion and advice. Best regards, Laszlo -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/517658d5.9040...@debian.org
