[Neurodebian-upstream] PyNN + NeuroTools packages

[Yury V. Zaytsev]

Hi!

On Sat, 2010-11-13 at 18:01 -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:

> unfortunately not.

Too bad...

> on our side we started working on covering neuralensemble (and closely
> related) products:  Neuron is in works, Brian packaging is pretty much
> done

Sounds promising!

> openelectrophy -- it was packaged but currently guys are redoing
> much, so packaging is not applying as is, i.e. needs work.

I know :-)

> PyNN, NeuroTools -- if there is demand, we will get them packaged.  

There is demand from the simulatoin community. E.g. PyNN is the only
official interface to FACETS neuromorphic hardware, but at the same time
not limited to it and also supports a number of pure software based
simulators, such as NEST (not sure about Brian / Neuron / PCSIM though)
and therefore can be used for benchmarking and inter-simulator
comparisons, which is an extremely important point.

NeuroTools are (as far as I understand) mostly used by data analysis
people, but it's a nice collection of scripts in general and it is
highly advantageous for a general Debian user to have all this installed
out of the box.

> May be you would be interested to join the effort, i.e. we provide
> initial packaging, and then you jump in helping to maintain them?

Although I am generically interested in everything I can't promise that
I will be maintaining them even if you do the initial work. I personally
don't use them and have a huge number of ongoing projects (just as all
of us).

I asked in the context of preparing an SfN-branded Lucid-based simulator
LiveCD, to promote simulators, Linux and Debian, because I discovered
that previously they were just installed into the system using
easy_install, which just begs for a proper solution...

Right now I am struggling with re-doing packaging for NEST 2rc1 and it's
a bit depressing on how much did the things change without being
properly documented in the Python policy in the meantime... 

Maybe if you people have IRC I might bug you then. It seems you are
leaps ahead of me in terms of Debian Python packaging experience.

> I have not investigated yet either any there were prior packaging
> efforts.  If you get us in touch with the authors -- it would be great;
> are they Linux, Debian/Ubuntu users by any chance? ;)

They are all Linux users, but I can't tell which distribution they are
using. Too bad you didn't attend to CodeJam this summer (understandably
though), all NeuralEnsemble people were there at one place.
 
-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev