[SciPy-User] [SciPy-user] Pylab - standard packages

[Thomas Kluyver]

Hi Yaroslav,

On 26 September 2012 15:20, Yaroslav Halchenko <lists at onerussian.com> wrote:
> For the users -- I am not quite sure, besides relatively rare use cases for
> people needing to install bleeding edge, unreleased, development version.
> For the released missing ones -- I would invite people just to create
> Debian-quality packages (it is not a rocket science) and contribute to
> NeuroDebian and_thus/or to Debian (since we upload to the root cause of this
> beauty).  Otherwise, with ad-hoc PPA -- these non-official, possible
> mediocre, packages, which might not follow the evolution of the official
> package in Debian (and thus Ubuntu) -- might diverge from the packaging in
> official repositories.

The aim certainly isn't to have 'mediocre' packages. I envisage
something similar to what you're doing, but for a much smaller set of
packages, and a broader audience than neuroscientists.

It looks like you're already maintaining ~all of the packages we're
interested in, and you've clearly got the repository infrastructure
running nicely. From a technical point of view, we could just point
users at NeuroDebian, and say "you don't need to be a neuroscientist,
just install these general packages". But that doesn't work in terms
of perception - people looking for Pylab will think that's a kludge.

If I can be bold, perhaps there's a way forward that suits everyone.
Would you be prepared to separate out the Pylab packages into another
repository that people could use without seeing the entirety of
Neurodebian? The source lists for Neurodebian would include the Pylab
repository as well, although we'd have to work out what to do for
existing subscribers. I imagine there's a bit more effort involved in
managing two repositories, but you may have more voluers to help with
the Pylab stuff. Then we could point at the Pylab repository as the
best way to get Pylab on Debian & Ubuntu - and naturally we'd credit
Neurodebian there.

Thanks,
Thomas