On Sun, Mar 11, 2001 at 05:20:31PM +1100, Drew Parsons wrote: > The question arises, what subsection should it be put into? > A comparable program, rasmol, is already in debian, in the math subsection. > But computational chemistry is not, strictly speaking, mathematics (it > can be considered a sub-branch of mathematics, but you don't usually talk > about the weight or electron affinity of a number). > > Looking through the math section, there are other packages which aren't > strictly maths: some biomaths programs (genesis, busx, hmmr), some plotting > programs (sciplot, grace, geg), some astronomical tools (seesat5, ssystem).
true.. i maintain sciplot, its use is not 'strictly' maths, is make 'strictly' devel though? i could probably use 'make' for stuff that would not necessarily be called 'development' or.. I could use hindent to reformat my html code without necessarily putting it on the 'web' .. > > I therefore wonder if it would not be more appropriate to call this > subsection "science" rather than "math" ? I've thought of this before, given that the sections are not fine-grained at all, I disagree with this proposal. science is such a generic word, it roughly (very roughly) equates with "having knowledge" applied sciences.. social sciences.. pure sciences.. even under those 3 broad non-all-inclusive supercategories theres many branches.. As some have said (I forget who and where) the only way to fix the section system is to replace it with keywords, for which having a canonical list somewhere would likely prevent it from being a huge mess. would even this be easy? no not really, its really hard to summarize "what something is useful for" in a single word much less several words, if you are working from a non-exhaustive list of words. hell.. there will always be unthought of uses.. you'd want to relegate it to what the common uses are.. even then this would not be easy. personally i think unless someone cares enough, its just as well to leave it the way it is. maybe a useful compromise would be to let something inhabit multiple sections -- Brian Russo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Debian/GNU Linux <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.debian.org LPSG "member" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.lpsg.org -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
