New subject: Metaproject: Debian Med tasks

8 Feb 2010


      Hi all,
1.) software reagarding medical/scientific tasks are spread all over the web. 
Effort has been undertaken to aggerate those in one place. Personally I have 
lost track. There are projects at freshmeat, sourceforge, savannah, debian-med 
and whatnot.
I personally feel it is up to the project maintainers to make their work 
public. Sure it would help if there was this one place where all software 
could come together but this is the missing link so far
2.) I did not find GNUmed listed at Debian-med any more. Did I just overlook 
it or miss something ?
3.) There seems to be an unofficial Debian package of openemr you might want 
to take a look at
http://www.openmedsoftware.org/wiki/OpenEMR_Downloads
Summary: Visibility of the great software and packaging effort of FOSS 
software is far from ideal. This severly hinders your chances to get picked up 
by users.
Everyone and their uncle has an app store today. All but FOSS software. Which 
is a shame. I mean first we create an kick ass alternative software. Then we 
either do not package it at all and require users to have Jedi powers to get 
it running or we package it in far too many formats and distributions so that 
a single prospective user does not have the slightest chance to get it 
installed. Why the hell do I need deb (Debian/Ubuntu etc.) rpm (individual rpm 
indeed for openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva etc.) ebuild and whatnot ?
Come on I am a software developer. Currently I spend more time packaging 
software then developing. This got to change. I know this is good for a flame 
war. Please don't. Let us find ways or maybe an infrastructure where packagers 
from various distributions can collaborate.
Tell you what. The minute the Linux/FOSS community decides on one package 
format we will see adoption rate go up. Distributions could concentrate on 
innovation rather then packaging and software developers would be relieved of 
the packaging job and hunting around for the right place to send the software.

Re: [fedora-medical] Metaproject: Debian Med tasks