On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 09:44 -0700, Scott Christley wrote: > On Oct 20, 2008, at 11:20 AM, Ross Boylan wrote: > > > On Sat, 2008-10-18 at 21:07 -0700, Scott Christley wrote: > >> Hello, > >> > >> I've been recently doing some work with the debian-med group to > >> package some software. There is a software package called Swarm > >> (http://www.swarm.org > >> ) which is an agent-based simulation toolkit that I would like to > >> package into Debian. It was suggested that I email this list as > >> debian-science has a broader view. I looked through the metapackages > >> listed on the wiki, but its unclear which is appropriate. Agent- > >> based > >> simulation is a general methodology and can be used for biology, > >> social science, or other computational sciences. Is debian-science > >> interested in modeling and simulation software? Can anybody suggest > >> an appropriate group? > >> > >> thanks > >> Scott > >> > > I have some interest in agent based modeling, and it seems like an > > appropriate topic to me. But I don't have time to do any of the work > > right now. > > I'm happy to do all of the packaging work, so no need for you to spend > time on that. Plus some work has been done already for packaging an > older version of Swarm, so that is a starting point for me. I'm new > to the Debian community so maybe I'm going about this the wrong way. > Essentially I'm asking if Debian-science is the right place for this > software, and if so what is the best way to get started? > > thanks > Scott Since those who know more haven't said anything, I'll give you my impressions of things.
To get a package into the official debian distribution you need a sponsor who is a Debian Developer and is authorized to upload packages. They can also help you out with the process. http://www.debian.org/devel/ is a good jumping off place for info on packaging things. Of course, you can prepare a package without bothering with such things, but getting it in the distribution offers a lot of advantages: visibility, access to many different platforms (autobuilders make packages for many different hardware configurations), greater likelihood of help maintaining the package, automatic world-wide distribution, and the bug tracking system. Against this is the higher overhead, at least initially, and the fact that there often seem to be difficulties getting packages to build on one or more platforms. There is a list, debian-mentors (not sure of exact name) where one can solicit help and sponsorship. My impression from previous traffic on this list is that they often send people to this list for scientific software. As I said, yours seems to fit. This list is more oriented toward users of scientific software; a list specifically about packaging scientific software was recently created. But a lot of developer type discussion seems to happen here. debian-science is a mailing list and a loose collaboration focused on scientific software; it also has some wiki pages. I don't think it is a formal group or a particular customized distribution, nor do I think there is any central authority to say "go ahead with x." I am mostly an onlooker and consumer in this whole process, so all of the above is just a best guess, and is certainly not authoritative. Ross P.S. Is swarm currently designed to support more than a single thread of execution? A quick look at the web site suggested that parallelism was hoped for, but not yet present. And the discussion seemed more oriented to threads than clusters. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
