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

[Mary-Anne Wolf]

This
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_healthcare_software
is a starting point for a list of all the software that exists.
One could build on that.

How practical would it be to create a tool which converts things
packaged each different way into some common package?
Let's imagine that we picked ebuild as our common format.
How hard would it be to write a tool to 
convert RPM packages into ebuild?

Mary-Anne

----- "Sebastian Hilbert"  wrote:
> From: "Sebastian Hilbert" 
> To: [e-mail], "FedoraMedical" , [e-mail]
> Sent: Monday, February 8, 2010 5:07:07 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: Re: [fedora-medical] Metaproject: Debian Med tasks
>
> 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.
> _______________________________________________
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Metaproject: Debian Med tasks

[Simon Slater]

On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 15:42 +0000, Mary-Anne Wolf wrote:
> This
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_healthcare_software
> is a starting point for a list of all the software that exists.
> One could build on that.
>
> How practical would it be to create a tool which converts things
> packaged each different way into some common package?
> Let's imagine that we picked ebuild as our common format.
> How hard would it be to write a tool to 
> convert RPM packages into ebuild?
>
> Mary-Anne
> From the non-coder point-of-view, is there much difference between

the .deb and .rpm formats, or between opensuse rpm and fedora rpm?

<snip>>
> > 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.

This is why I have gone slow in implementing one thing across our
practice.  If I find some software that looks good, have I missed
something better just because I didn't have the time to keep looking in
places not obvious to me.
> > 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

<snip>
> > 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.

For a specific class or grouping of software, the effectiveness of the
programme is more important than the distribution it runs on.  Being
able to find related software in one place is very important.

However from what Susmit was asking in relation to this SIG, why I am
looking for software to use under Fedora is more from a practice
expansion point-of-view.  Now we use Fedora across all computers, but
when the server is running the software we need and all is going
smoothly, I will change the server over to CentOS.  Then with multiple
practice locations and no time to maintain all the desktops, we can then
look at Red Hat with minimal disturbance to the end users and the
office/practice manager has a 24hr support line that is not me.