Re: Regarding Press enquiry about debian-med blends
Hi again,
I just realised that I was incomplete about the main question.
This is a fixed text:
Hi Donald,
Am Tue, Jun 20, 2023 at 05:01:18PM -0400 schrieb Donald Norwood:
> > Here we are. Andreas (in CC) volunteered to answer your questions. What
> > is it about, and what are the specific questions?
> >
>
> Much appreciation for your time, I didn't want to give a general answer
> considering all the work that you all have done. :)
Thank you. :-)
> The inquiry is from Bruce Byfield, care of Linux Pro Magazine:
A general statement in andvance: In Debian we can only *package* free
software that is *available* in the field of Medicine and
Bioinformatics. Its a pretty common misunderstanding that developers of
Debian Med are coding medical software themselves. IMHO it is important
to state this in advance in a general article.
> Can you say more about the contents of Med Blend?
Debian Blends are caring for packages in a specific field. The team
that is crafting the Debian Med Blend is a team inside Debian that cares
for packages in the field of Medicine and Biology (as well as the needed
preconditions).
The fact that we can package only *available* free software has the
consequence that the big majority of software is from the field of
bioinformatics where Free Software under Linux is kind of an accepted
default for many scientists. There is also quite some software
available for medical imaging. The usual expectation in Debian Med
is that it fits general practitioners needs. Well, we have packaged
GNUmed in cooperation with its authors but this is the only relevant
tool in this field. There are a few other pieces of software in this
field but these are not packaged (any more) for different reasons.
For a complete overview about the different software categories - we
are calling these "tasks" in Blends terminology can be seen on the
so called tasks page which can be found here:
https://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/
> I've added:
>
> What does the team have planned toward the future?
The greatest challenge is probably to provide some preconditions in
machine learning, specifically Python3 support for tensorflow. This
would open a couple of modern tools in epidemiology (used in
investigation of COVID-19 pandemie) and bioinformatics.
We might also need data exploration tools like Python Panel.
Apropos COVID-19: In 2020 quite a number of developers joined the team
which I tried to summarise in my talk at DebConf21[1]. This talk might
also answer your questions in more detail. Besides information about
Debian Med I'm also talking about general problems of the Debian release
process in the middle of the talk.
> How well received has the Med Blend been?
We realised that the majority of users of Debian Med profiting from the
work of the Debian Med team via Debian derivatives like Ubuntu or Mint
and do not even know the term "Debian Med" nor the idea of the project.
While using derivatives is perfectly OK it hides the team from user
responses which is a shame since we would be happy to focus even more on
users needs.
We are actually packaging at user requests. Its an unknown fact that
the big majority of the developers who are currently active inside the
Debian Med team are not really working in the field themselves so proper
response of users is the driving force for progress inside the project.
The motivation of those "outsiders" to contribute is very different
reaching from "want to help my colleagues" until "its a cool team I
enjoy the work here".
> What are they most proud of?
We consider the software we have packaged as pretty good tested since we
have put a lot of effort into writing CI tests for most of our packages.
As I mentioned above most developers are no experts in this field of
science and these automated tests are helping us to ensure the packages
will be useful for our users.
Another thing we are proud of is the healthy climate inside the team.
Otherwise it would not be possible to assemble a team of developers from
quite different fields all just following the unique motivation to build
the best operating system for users in medicine and biology.
I'd happily answer more questions in whatever detail might be needed.
Kind regards in your interest into Debian Med
Andreas.
[1] https://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/20210825_one_year_of_pandemie/
--
http://fam-tille.de
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