Hi Steffen, I took the freedom to publish your (actually not that private) mail to the Debian Med mailing list because on one hand it is interesting in general for the list on the other hand we are responsible to give a report to the Debian community which was supporting our sprint.
On Wed, Feb 02, 2011 at 12:21:12AM +0100, Steffen Möller wrote: > Dear all, > > we had some special time over the weekend. I think the last time I sat that > long in front of computers or chatted about that was > for my first post doc. Hmmmm, did you ever joined a Debian Conference[1]? You can get the experience of last weekend for a whole week! Honestly, if anyone of the participiants of the sprint in Travemünde (or any reader of Debian Med list as well) wants to join DebConf in Banja Luka (the whole time or in parts) this is a perfect thing to continue what we just started and there is always the chance to present your project to a wider Debian audience (as Debian application in practice or derived distribution). > Core tangible achievements were: > > * the synchronisation between Hajo, Alan, David and Peter was exceptional, I > tend to think > * Pjotr got his rq package done (queued to be uploaded) Cool - but what is rq? I can't find it in SVN nor on our tasks page. > * William and Richard are happy about their now completely functional > Ensembl package (compiling in the background) Is it really ready for upload? Just ping me if you need a sponsor. > * Tony is happy about a now working cran2deb at > http://master.dermacloud.uni-luebeck.de/cran2deb/ (not full, yet) Please coordinate with Dirk Eddelbuettel about possibly necessary patches for his upstream cran2deb. > * Tim is happy about using the Debian Med repository for more than he did > before and the presumed Debian vs Ubuntu packaging > conflict was nullified, at least Andreas and I have, with help from Will, > understood BioLinux as a better non-free for all those > packages that Debian would not want to redistribute as they are. Conversely, > BioLinux is likely to present itself more as an > extension of Debian Med. They have a repository for amd64 that we can use > already today. I'm really keen on enhancing the cooperation with Bio-Linux as far as possible. > * Alex' package for vienna-rna I had some further look into vienna-rna and it is close to be finished (modulo some discussion with upstream whether they might remove some auto-builded stuff from their upstream tarball which makes handlin the clean target much harder than necessary). > Stimulating: > > * We had a very nice mix of "upstream" (the real thing) and Debian > developers. I think we are the first Debian Meeting to achieve > such. I think the same and I really regarded it inspiring. > * Pjotr's call to arms for better marketing, seconded by about everyone Ahhhh, so Pjotr is our first marketing officier in the Debian Med team? That would be really cool! I think with Tony they could really form a strike force. :-) > * the data management people have some idea what to look for and do next, > some more thinking is still required, though. Olivier's > solution is fantastic, but very remote from Debian, while the getData tool is > far less comfortable and far less functional. The > good thing is: everyone can publish about it without disturbing the other too > much. I intend to have a look at biomaj in more detail once Olivier has published a downloadable tarball. > * Manuel, Andreas, Michael and Christian did some intense training on Debian > packaging that was well received from what I heard I've actually got some packages close to upload. The first of them (mothur) was uploaded just now to new. More will come and I'll present a list of them once they are really uploaded (or at least mention what finally prevents an upload). > * Jim was happy about what he all saw and understood, even though jmol and > jalview with it still need some extra love I don't know about jalview but at least Jmol is in New! > * Joel has improved his packaging skills and only swears about the > non-standard python packaging ... well, everyone does that. > Send your questions to the debian-devel list, Joel. ... and your packaging effort to SVN. This is actually the best way to get help if we can look at your code. > * T-Coffee packaging was updated by Tim, Paolo and ... Andreas? Having > Paolo from the upstream group as a maintainer would be > great, I am just somewhat uncertain about the degree of co-maintainership > that was reached during that meeting. I'm not aware that I did something about T-Coffee (even if I admit I touched a lot of stuff and might have mixed up things). The only thing what I did is working on TMalign which is also soon to be uploaded after I've got a very quick and helpful response from upstream (more in a separate mail). > What to improve: > > * I wish I had had more time for everyone of you. Especially with Juergen, > Alex, David, Olivier and Paolo I wish to have had more > time with. > * We had Eagle Genomics as a commercial partner - did anybody notice? I > think I would have liked to have a second or third > commercial partner. > * More education for everyone on latest issues? GPU and FPGA programming > come to mind. Again I would hope for some industry > participation on this. > > And next: > > * I hope to be a BOSC in Vienna. Most likely this is when quite some of us > will meet again. http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/BOSC_2011 July 15-16, 2011 Hmmm, that's right after LSM and right before DebCamp which would make three weeks absense from home for Open Source stuff - I do not think that I will manage this all (even if Vienna is half way to Banja Luka). > * We could have a Debian Med poster at the main conference, actually. Ahh, we just have a task for our advertising army! :-) > * About everyone had asked me for a schedule. I intentionally refused to > prepare one since I wanted our meeting to be as close to > a conference-typical coffee break as possible. This was good and bad at the > same time, I tend to think. If I had set up for > instance a 1 to many training session, this would have freed three DDs to do > more project oriented work. But it would also most > possibly be dissatisfactory for the trainees. And fixed windows for talks on > this or that would have hampered the many to many > pairwise prior discussions that help preparing the larger gatherings. I think the (intentional non-)organisation was perfect to create a productive environment. I know this from other Debian sprints and it was fine this way. > Finally > > * Please send in your suggestions for the next meeting and on what I should > focus for the public summary of this one, except for I'd suggest to do the discussion about the summary here in public. Other readers might be interested as well and you can address possible question from them. > the better and free internet, I know. Yep, the only drawback - but it did not harmed the final result very badly, just some random annoyance and I experienced other sprints with similar problems. Regarding free internet in hotels Germany is just a development country. :-( Perhaps some alternative would be a university campus where we might be allowed to plug into their network. > * Should we try publishing a position paper somewhere on what we did and how > we did it? As noted in the beginning: We should give some summary and these mails could be a start for it. I would love if every attendee would give a short work report. As I said I'll do once I finally polished and uploaded all packages which I touched. Even if some people might consider their work as not that much. Something like "I learned packaging at the example of package X" is also work and might lead to other commitments to the team later which are greatly appreciated. > And why this is a nice compensation to the typical scientific meetings? IMHO it is a nice compensation because it is something else? > Where should it go? In any case to the sprint page[2] which is part of the Sprint deal. A very short Summary should go to Debian Med News[3] where we just announced the sprint I also think we should should copy this article to DPN[4]. If you know other places where we can spread the word that's fine. > * I received one request for some written confirmation of attendance. Are > there more? > * It was a very interesting experience for me to have had you all in my > neighbourhood. The hotel was not my first choice. And it > was not my second or third or forth or fifth. But I was positively surprised. > > Best regards and wishes > > Steffen Steffen, thanks for your brave work to bring all these people together! When I heard about your plan in the first place I did not expected that massive resonance and the really productive meeting. See you all at next Debian Med sprint - I had a lot of fun and success Andreas [1] http://debconf.org/ [2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Luebeck2011 [3] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/ [4] http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/ -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-med-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110202090032.gb14...@an3as.eu
