Classification of scientific software in Debian

The goal of this page is to discuss how software used for DebianScience could be properly classified.

There is clearly a demand for that. There is also interest for creating meta packages or a tasksel task.

Debtags

As Debtags are being integrated into Packages files it might be the way to go.

• Enrico Zini is willing to assist but is looking for someone else to come up with some initial set of categories to discuss. Relevant reading.

• Debtags on Salsa.

• Tagging guidelines

• Read also: https://www.enricozini.org/blog/2007/paper-debconf7/

• Debtags and debram merging

• Thaddeus H. Black has expressed his involvement in the Debtags effort. He is also the author of the former debram effort that classified some science software in the 14 division. See his message.

Playing with 'goscience'

goscience is a patch (474603) to goplay that takes advantage for science packages of the easy debtags browsing features of goplay.

Building a patched goplay package

The recipe is for sid.

# apt install dh-buildinfo libept-dev libept-dev libwibble-dev libwibble-dev libfltk1.1-dev fluid 
$ wget "https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=5;filename=goscience-merida.patch;att=1;bug=474603" -O goscience-merida.patch
$ apt-get source goplay
$ cd goplay-0.3/
$ patch -p 1 < ../goscience-merida.patch
$ debuild -uc -us
# dpkg -i goplay_0.3-1_i386.deb
$ goscience &

Debtags already existing for the 'field' facet

You can search for the already tagged software with the debtags interface: https://debtags.debian.org/search/ and tag software that has not been properly tagged: https://debtags.debian.org/reports/todo/

• field::astronomy
• field::biology
• field::chemistry
• field::electronics
• field::geography
• field::linguistics
• field::mathematics
• field::physics
• field::statistics

Other QA

Another QA effort that might be related is the PackagesDescriptionsReview. It may even be the one to focus on first.

There is also the ddtp effort to translate the packages descriptions.

Tags discussion

The scientific fields in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_of_science

The possible tags for Debian science related projects could be

• visualization - programs like gnuplot, labplot, mayavi etc.,
• data processing - programs like octave
• diagrams - programs like dia, xfig
• publishing - programs like latex, bibtex etc.,

Proposed categories

You can follow this thread to see all opinions. Please add a wiki link to the following categories if it already exists a Debian Science wiki page related to any of the following. Try to spell out the categories to avoid mistakes, as suggested.

• science-biology - It has been suggested to make it depend on med-bio and med-bio-dev; this suggestion works for the purpose of installation but has certain drawbacks for other CDD tools. Perhaps the best solution is to sync the contents of the med-bio tasks file with science-bio tasks file.

• science-physics - adopt dependencies from education-physics

• science-chemistry - plus adopt dependencies from education-chemistry

• science-genomics - It has been suggested to make this a sub topic of ?science-biology, something like science-biology-genomics possibly with a dummy package science-biology-full - not separately available in Debian-Med

• science-mathematics

• science-electronics

• science-astronomy - plus adopt dependencies from education-astronomy

• science-typesetting

The following categories were suggested but not covered by any dependency

The discussion revealed a huge lot of suggested fields but the people who suggested a field forgot / were not able to add any package that would be useful in the field. So these categories are subject to removal from the list but are here for further reference.

• science-bibliography - It has been suggested to merge this with DebianScience/Typesetting science-publishing]

• science-structural
• science-architectural
• science-mechanical

• science-pharmaceuticals - It has been suggested to leave this to Debian-Med (do not hesitate to list the packages you are interested in here)

• science-signal-processing
• science-agricultural
• science-geophysical
• science-climatology
• science-fluid-dynamics
• science-archaeology

• science-anthropology - It has been suggested to be the same as archaeology

• science-sociology
• science-economics
• science-geography

• science-medical-imaging - Covered by debian-med

• science-psychology - It has been suggested to leave this to debian-med

• science-linguistics
• science-hci