On 06/04/16 21:19, Wookey wrote: >> > .. perhaps be more aggressive in >> > removing software that's no longer useful and just lies in the archive >> > dormant. > The fact that Debian has a lot of software is a genuine benefit. Just > because stuff is old, does not mean it is no longer useful. The > problem is that we don't really know how to distinguish between > old-and-just-cruft and old-and-still-handy. The popcon stats may help.
For the packages in Debian Science and Debian Med I tend to think that it accommodates a bunch of packages that mostly are of historic value now. People may use them to compare how well their new methods compare against the old stuff but the package itself may not be used that much and the authors never did much maintenance beyond their scientific questions, anyway - which is also because of the grant-driven funding schemes and the scientics moving institutions after some 1-5 years. Those archeological gems I consider to be valuable, in particular when original binaries were only offered for the then common but today unseen platforms like DEC, SGI and Sun. So, we have old-and-just-craft, old-and-still-handy, and some first-step-on-the-moon kind of packages. Steffen That said, now, with Debian-Astro established, do we possibly find someone to adopt the code and emulators for the Apollo missions (http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/) for us? And, no, I do not really think that footprints on the moon are good for much scientific benchmarking. Although, who knows, some extraterrestrials may find those more easily accessible than any such on earth. Uh, bed time.
