Re: yet another talk submitted
On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 09:09:55PM -0400, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: > > It is not per se about blends. I see blends as the best and easy > solution to jump on to make Debian more appealing to the generic > audience, be it a science or any other user-base with given interests. > With the talk though I want to express the opinion that Debian is > already ready to become a distribution of choice for many user-bases > among mortals, and that is a particularly good fit for scientific users. > Question is: why then it hasn't become popular among them (yet)? and I > speculate that it is simply due to the lack of visibility of > Debian among those users and this issue could be easily addressed. > Moreover I wanted to reiterate some issues, currently not fully > addressed in Debian, which are somewhat specific to scientific > user-base. I have read your abstract exactly like this and I really like it. I hope I will have good enough bandwidth to follow the DebConf video stream. ;-) Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.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/20100430070928.gd28...@an3as.eu
Re: yet another talk submitted
On Thu, 29 Apr 2010, David Bremner wrote: > > 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). > Hi Yaroslav; Hi David, > Pardon my sloppy and quick reading (marking finals calls :) ), but if I I guess I should express pardon from my side that idea didn't stick out well to be more obvious . > read you right, you intend to focus on the idea blends for science, > which I think deserves its own session, and if you have enough material > for a lecture, then I say go for it. It is not per se about blends. I see blends as the best and easy solution to jump on to make Debian more appealing to the generic audience, be it a science or any other user-base with given interests. With the talk though I want to express the opinion that Debian is already ready to become a distribution of choice for many user-bases among mortals, and that is a particularly good fit for scientific users. Question is: why then it hasn't become popular among them (yet)? and I speculate that it is simply due to the lack of visibility of Debian among those users and this issue could be easily addressed. Moreover I wanted to reiterate some issues, currently not fully addressed in Debian, which are somewhat specific to scientific user-base. -- .-. =-- /v\ = Keep in touch// \\ (yoh@|www.)onerussian.com Yaroslav Halchenko /( )\ ICQ#: 60653192 Linux User^^-^^[17] -- 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/20100430010955.gd8...@onerussian.com
And one more (Re: yet another talk submitted)
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:/
Re: yet another talk submitted
On Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:24:23 -0400, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: > On Wed, 28 Apr 2010, Kumar Appaiah wrote: > > 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). > Hi Yaroslav; Pardon my sloppy and quick reading (marking finals calls :) ), but if I read you right, you intend to focus on the idea blends for science, which I think deserves its own session, and if you have enough material for a lecture, then I say go for it. d -- 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/87d3xhudny@rocinante.cs.unb.ca
yet another talk submitted
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 what it was before reformatting:
#!/bin/bash
Debian: {enri,rea}ching the science community
In this talk we suggest to consider few aspects which could help
Debian to become the Ultimate OS of choice in the science community.
Debian's slogan "The Universal Operating System" has provoked
extensive discussions in the recent years. Most of the time we,
Debian enthusiasts, agree that Debian generally deserves this title.
We primarily agree because we invested our valuable time and efforts
to make it such. Unfortunately our sentiment to Debian is often not
shared by "outsiders". We keep working hard but nevertheless in the
eyes of many Debian, if known at all, remains a Linux for geeks.
Nevertheless, some smart people take advantage of the internal
knowledge we all share, that "Debian is the best". They refurnish it
for "humans" by providing some target audience with explicit hints
that this product was created "for them" and often veiling the fact
that the actual product is coming from a "geekland" (i.e. us). Often
such derivative works diverge from the suggested principle of "stay
close to Debian", thus in danger of loosing numerous advantages Debian
provides.
Recently, the Ultimate Debian Database projects made a significant
leap forward by providing assimilation of information about the status
of Debian packages in Debian proper and Ubuntu. Debian Pure Blends
(formerly known as Custom Debian Distribution) provided a machinery
for tailoring The Universal Debian to fit the desires of target
user-bases in Science, Medicine, Education, and other domains.
Inclusion of information about projects which either are already in
Debian, or on the way to it, or even outside of Debian, made Blends an
invaluable resource for any Debian user. Moreover they could be
considered as a basic FOSS portal where it becomes very easy to find
information about projects related to our day-to-day interests.
We argue, that unfortunately those efforts haven't brought Debian out
of the "geekland" in the eyes of "humans" user-base. It still
requires additional efforts to deliver the message that "Debian is for
you". Debian is already known in the "geekland" as the most stable
Linux distribution and scientific audience is already a primary target
of many Pure Blends, such as Debian Science and Debian Med. It seems
that visibility is what is missing for enlightening the research
communities with already existing advantages of FOSS and Debian in
particular.
Such visibility could be easily achieved by
* spreading the word about Debian via presenting at specialized
scientific (outside of FOSS movement) conferences, with known demand
on the software being already present in Debian
* better visibility of Blends within Debian itself, i.e. by guiding
newcomers of www.debian.org to the respective themes (or Blends) of
Debian which remain Debian
* visibility and integration (sharing ratings/popularity) of Debian
with specialized FOSS portals (e.g. nitrc.org, medfloss.org), where
Debian could be suggested as an Ultimate deployment platform
But scientific computing has its own maggots which need to be
addressed before Debian could become indeed the choice one OS in
science. In this talk we would like to reiterate on some issues and
possible/already suggested ways for resolution
* deployment (installation vs virtualization vs cloud-computing vs
chrooting)
* references (must not enforced but should be readily available)
* installation (finer scale selection of blends/tags within d-i)
* stability vs dynamics (backports per blend?)
Moreover Debian could easily attract more of software developers
working on scientific FOSS by providing adequate welcoming material
guiding them into the theme of "Scientific Developers Debian".
--
.-.
=-- /v\ =
Keep in touch// \\ (yoh@|www.)onerussian.com
Yaroslav Halchenko /( )\ ICQ#: 60653192
Linux User^^-^^[17]
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