RFC: Fedora Spin for Scientific Research

[Bill Nottingham]

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.

> >>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?

Bill