New tags for biology and medicine.

[Andreas Tille]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Steffen Moeller wrote:

> To me DebTags are a way to describe
> software packages. A main motivation to have these tags, if I recall
> correctly, is to filter packages when presenting them to users to make them
> select software for local installations.

Perfectly agreed. But you was talking about clusters and I doubt that
any user is presented the list of packages based on DebTags to install
a cluster.

>> Well, you mentioned that you want to do this but I have never seen giving
>> you any reason for this or any advantage you want to gain by using this.
>
> The advantage is the adaption to complex workflows. I see no way that system
> administrators can prepare all tools well in advance and all database and
> update them all in time. No way, even for some constrained field like
> biological sequence analysis.

This statement obviousely shows that you had not yet looked into FAI.
I guess Thomas Lange (FAI author) would smirk brightly if he would read
this. :)
Moreover I continuosely fail to see in how far this will be changed by
implementing deeper DebTags hierarchy.

> Maybe the admins get in sync for the first
> users and agree on some setup, they will not do it for the 205th. And they
> should not. So if you need a tailored runtime environment for your tasks,
> then you need some way to get it established dynamically.  Now, every cluster
> participating in a, e.g., campus grid can allow arbitrary installations or
> they could be constrained differently for each cluster.

But you are describing local need of a campus that could never been
implemented in DebTags.  FAI just has this kind of classification and
was build for exactly this reason.

> DebTags would appear
> like a very reasonable language to constrain and describe packages.

I don't think so in the sense you mentioned above but in a much more
general sense.  DebTags-devel people might correct me if I'm wrong.

> This has something of a hen-and-egg problem. We have this file here:
> http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-med/trunk/community/debtags/tags?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
> which features many facets, badly lacking descriptions, still. We could come
> up with an extension of that format (or it may be existing already) that also
> assigns the affected packages for each term. With a certain number of
> assignments we would ask for their adoption by debtags. Would this sound
> reasonable?

At least I will not stop you in trying. ;-))

Kind regards

         Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de