On Sun, Feb 06, 2011 at 01:28:46AM +0100, Steffen Möller wrote:
>
> This is a good question. My main concern is that Debian for some
> reason or another may be perceived as incompatible by the scientific
> community. If anything would require manual adjustments then we then
> lose our edge in automated mass installs in clusters/clouds.
This is an important point but I think this is not only in scientific
field. It is also in all the derivatices / crossdistro discussion
discussion (keyword application store discussion recently happened in
Nürnberg).
> In my mind, to help collaborations best and help the community on the
> way, we should strive towards limiting what we need to exchange between
> sites. As much as possible one shall refer to standardised packages
> across platforms and distributions to the degree that this is doable.
I just would like to remind that there are always two sides from where
you can tackle this problem: upstream and distributor. In the past I
quite frequently experienced that some upstreams highly regard hints
given from Debian perspective and I guess/hope Debian is not the only
instance which tries to give upstream reasonable hints. Communication
is never one way. So if distributors as technical instance try to teach
upstream with about some technical issues all parties including users
will profit. To come back to the plink issue: Even on completely
manually installed computers without any distributions you can
experience a name clash - this is not at all Debian specific. Debian
just cares about it. So upstream would be well advised to change the
string they use for their binary (and inform their users at a well
percived place). Other examples are the usage of complex build systems
like in the dcmtk case: Debian is building dynamic libraries with
proper sonames and it would be reasonable for upstream to take this
over. This would for the profit of other distributions as well as users
installing it without packaging system.
> My working route towards that the Debian installation should be resembling
> as much as possible the installation that a sysadmin would be performing
> from upstream's sources.
Here we agree and as said above: If upstream will follow our advise we
could make the work of non-Debian using admins easier as well (and
probably save upstream some time in giving support in case they need to
answer support questions).
Coming back to our role in the sicentific world: Usually scientists are
picky about stuff they are doing. I think we can establish a good
communication if we also show the same attempt and are also picky about
the stuff we are doing.
Kind regards
Andreas.
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