[Neurodebian-upstream] PyNN + NeuroTools packages

[Yaroslav Halchenko]

On Sun, 14 Nov 2010, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote:
> There is demand from the simulatoin community. E.g. PyNN is the only
> official interface to FACETS neuromorphic hardware, but at the same time
> >...<

thanks for the summary description

> > 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).

indeed ;-)

> 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...

heh SfN... it charged us more than 2k$ to setup our basic Debian
booth at SfN2010, despite our description of what Debian is about and
what (enthusiasm with absent financial insensitive) makes it.
Great to have James Haxby's support for all our "silly" endeavors ;)

meanwhile, we are thinking about creating our "NeuroDebian-branded" live
USB/DVD... since we make everything public, customizing it for a
particular need might become a trivial job ;)

> 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...

well... there is not much actually in that policy, which is also not per
se a strict official policy but rather guidelines, thus not always
strictly enforced.  For distutils/setuptools-build packages simple
packaging (no unittesting during build etc) is trivial especially with
debhelper7

what is more intriguing me is how do you manage to package NEST taking
into account its license... did you get "NEST Initiative's written
approval"? how do you acquire "written agreement by the recipient of the
terms of this agreement" for your packages users? ;)  some terms
for "Nest license" seems to be utter overkill imho which simply forbid
sensible re-distribution, thus making it not even a candidate for Debian
non-free.

> 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.
well, we have IRC OFTC/#exppsy but we are not very active there I must
say

may be it would be more productive to use the mailing list, e.g.
neurodebian-devel if you like to take it off -upstream list

> > 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.

may be next time... we do not know yet our financial/time allowances
for the next year

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