John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de> writes: > I have worked as a physicist myself for a long time and also did numerical > physics and have dealt with a lot of software written by scientists. The > quality of scientific software is usually of exceptional low quality > because 90% of those scientists are neither programmers nor do they > care of adhering to any common quality standards when developing > software.
Being a physcist myself: Honestly, you are distributing FUD here. Sure, there software like this. But this is rarely the software we have in Debian, for a number of reasons (speaking for astrophysics, which is my topic): * There is a specialization that people concentrate on doing software, still being scientists, * software engineers are specifically hired to develop or support science software, * Communication and critics within the community (wrt. software) strongly increased, partly due to Github, which is a great platform here. This is accompanied with a general move towards the Bazaar development model. As the highlight example, you may take Astropy, https://www.astropy.org This is developed by more than hundred people (github says: "241 contributors"), mostly volunteers, backed by (very) few professionals. A great community, excellent communication into all directions, and a very high code quality. Astropy comes with an "affiliated package" concept, which invites people to contribute their own software, with a review process that keeps the software quality high there as well. Ofcourse, there is still low-quality software. But apart from very specific code, the major problem here is *old* (*OLD*!) software that was written by software engineers. Software written in the 80s or 90s, with very questionable hacks to save 10 bytes, only partially documented, often unclear copyright and licensing, bad upstream communication etc. But still needed, either since they still are the only solution, or as a reference. IRAF is the archetype for all this in my field. So, it is a wrong prejudice that we have low quality software because of unexperienced and ignorant scientists. > Furthermore, from my own experience, most people compile scientific > software from source anyway due to performance reasons, especially > when it comes to using them for large calculations. This is not true, and it was not true in the past: Since there are now many professional and optimized libraries for a lot of standard tasks (FFT, algebra etc.), and thanks to the raise of Python, many scientists (astrophysicists) do not require self-compiled software anymore. Since we move away from the NIH syndrom, dependencies play a greater role than before, and are solved by packaging frameworks (PIP, {Astro}Conda as distribution agnostic examples). And in the Good Old Times, the installation from source was so complicated (IRAF!) that people just took the binary tarballs. The field (in astrophysics) where your assumption is correct is cosmological simulations ("gadget" as an example here). Unpackaged exactly because of this. > So I don't see a point for having to package all of that in Debian. Some statistics: in astrophysics, we have a "Source Code Library" https://ascl.net which tries to collect all the source code people wrote for their (refereed) science. About 6 percent (93 out of ~1600) of them are currently packaged for Debian. That is not exactly "all of that", but it is what people need to do astrophysics (well, almost. White areas still exist). Best regards Ole
