Hi, On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 02:24:23PM -0400, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: > On Wed, 28 Apr 2010, Kumar Appaiah wrote: > > In addition, if folks here have a request for a talk on a particular > > topic, which they would not be able to present themselves, it would > > still be nice to convey the suggestions to the list and/or Michael, > > so that others who might like the idea could take it up, and > > potentially talk about that subject. > > Although not requested, I've decided to share the abstract I've just > submitted. I wanted to get your feedback (does it sound worth > "lecturing" or may be some kind of "discussion" would be more > appropriate).
Here is my own submission -- related to Yarik's in that it is a concrete example of (successfully) promoting Debian in a particular field of science -- neuroimaging research. ------------------------------------------------ Debian: The ultimate platform for neuroimaging research Over the past decade the neuroimaging research community has fortunately converged on the open source software development model, with the vast majority of all widely used applications and libraries being available as source code, and a substantial proportion covered by free software licenses. Today, there exists a large code base for data collection (e.g. behavioral psychological experiments), data analysis (e.g. of functional magnetic resonance imaging; fMRI), and data visualization that is productively used in everyday research activities. A representative list of available tools is provided on the NITRC portal [0]. Initially, most of these tools were mere by-products of actual neuroscience research projects, developed by students, and scholars who are, in general, not trained software engineers. As a result, software development in this field still differs significantly from established good practices in the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Many projects start without a clear deployment or management concept, and due to lack of man-power are later on forced into an \textit{ivory tower development} model -- restricting the ``supported'' environment as an attempt to reduce the required maintenance effort. They try to decouple themselves from ongoing developments and include specific versions of all external dependencies into their source distributions. The result is too often a fork that is no longer updated with bugfixes or enhancements. Many useful projects die because it becomes too expensive to update them. However, it is hard to blame the respective developers, because the sheer number of existing combinations of operating systems, hardware, and library versions makes it almost impossible to verify that a particular software is working as intended. Restricting the ``supported'' runtime environment is one approach of making verification efforts feasible. On the other hand, development in the free software community sometimes proceeds at an enormous pace, and many projects do frequent releases with sometimes backward-incompatible changes. Forcing a dependency on an outdated release shifts the burden of maintenance and deployment onto users, as it gets increasingly difficult to have older releases available. On the other hand, continuously updating software to the latest developments is a time-consuming task for which there is no immediate scientific benefit. I will argue that Debian is the ideal solution to this problem. This talk will provide an overview of current projects and individual efforts within Debian that help researchers to maintain a fully-functional Debian-based environment for neuroscience research with minimal effort (e.g. Debian Med, Debian Science). Moreover, it introduces NeuroDebian [1] -- a platform specifically targeting the neuroscience community. I'm going to show several case examples of packaging efforts that illustrate typical problems, such as non-commercial/non-standard licenses, non-existing upstream bugtracker and unavailable version control systems. Furthermore, I will offer some evidence that a substantial migration towards Debian is already under way. Popularity statistics and personal communication indicates that a growing number of researchers see it as 1) making neuroscience software (e.g. for medical imaging) accessible to a larger user-base, and reducing the required maintenance effort on the user side, 2) improving software quality, and 3) enabling developers to spend more time on developing new scientifically relevant features. The talk will conclude with thoughts on what Debian could do to further facilitate its adoption as the ultimate platform for scientific research, such as tailored guidelines for deployment and project management, possibility to run complete regression test suites, as well as reliable usage statistics to justify funding project funding. [0] http://www.nitrc.org [1] http://neuro.debian.net ------------------------------------------------ -- GPG key: 1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke http://mih.voxindeserto.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-science-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100430000826.ga23...@meiner