RFC: Fedora Spin for Scientific Research

[Amit Saha]

On 06/01/2011 12:14 AM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Amit Saha (droidery at gmail.com) said:
>>>> Seems like a generally reasonable idea. I'd suggest iterating with
>>>> the SciTech SIG over what they'd like to see in a spin, if you haven't
>>>> already.
>>>
>>> Thanks for showing interest. Before I emailed Rel-eng, I had emailed the
>>> the SciTech SIG list. Soon after, I saw on the mailman page that the
>>> mailing list was de-activated. It would ofcourse be great to co-ordinate
>>> with this SIG for this effort. Would there be a contact person?
>
> Whoops,didn't know it was inactive. I'd suggest then posting to devel@;
> there are plenty of people from the SciTech SIG page that are active there,
> and they may have some ideas.

I am guessing you mean: 
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel ? Cool, I can 
kick start a discussion there.

>
>>>> With respect to the composition, I would suggest maybe seeing if you
>>>> could frame it in terms of the groups we already have (engineeirng&
>>>> scientific, development), more than in terms of just packages. For
>>>> Fedora 16, we can certainly adjust the groups where necessary.
>>>
>>> Yes, that is what I initially intended to do. Let me check this up and
>>> report my findings.
>>
>> At this point of time, it doesn't look like I can use any of the
>> existing package groups to design the kickstart file (except the
>> ones I include from -desktop.ks).
>>
>> Current packages in "Engineering and Scientific" group can be split
>> into sub-groups: math, chemistry, physics, biology,
>> geographic,distributed, parallel and generic packages. Quite
>> exhaustive! (If such a sub-division sounds like a good idea, I can
>> do that.)
>>
>> My goal in creating a Fedora Scientific spin is however to create a
>> "base" level scientific spin which can be used by anyone working in
>> research so that he/she already has the minimum writing, plotting,
>> experimenting tools available when he/she starts. The current
>> kickstart file can be seen at [1]. The ISO file stands at 1.2 G.
>
> Would it be possible to make the mandatory packages in Eng&Scientific
> your selected packages,and have the others listed as optional?

That sounds a great option, I think. The Eng&Scientific group could have 
the mandatory sections with generic packages from my current kickstart 
file and the more "specialized" packages currently in Eng&Scientific 
could go into the optional section. (I am guessing these changes have to 
be done in comps-f16.xml in the git repo.)

My current list of packages would then undergo a two-way split :

1. Mandatory science/engineering oriented generic packages like 
texmaker,gnuplot,xfig..will just be included from @engineering and 
scientific in my kickstart file.

2. Compilers/Interpreters/Programming language providing packages like 
'gcc','clojure','R' go as individual packages in my kickstart file


Best,
-Amit

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