Public answer to doc who wants to help w GNUmed

[Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu>]

Hi Vance,

I've put your e-mail in BCC to not expose it to spammers in case you
might care.  All other content of your private mail which I'm responding
to is not really private so I see no point in hiding my answer from
other readers of the Debian Med mailing list.

At first also thanks to Karsten to keep me in the row. ;-)

Am Wed, Jul 12, 2023 at 08:44:43PM -0500 schrieb Vance R. Burns, MD:
> Thank you for the quick response. I have an interest in helping with
> whatever I can.  I'm not sure what goes into maintaining packages but if it
> can be learned from web resources and a Mentor I am willing to give it a
> try.

Inside the Debian Med team we are actually running a project to mentor
newcomers:

   https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/community/MoM/-/wikis/Mentoring-of-the-Month-(MoM)

However, I think the gnumed package is neither a good candidate for
learning packaging (since all work is done) and the effort to maintain the
package tends to zero.  Karsten usually sends me a mail about a new release.
When I receive this mail I'm firing up the script `routine-update` which in
>95% does what it needs to do.  So things are semi-automated and for this
task no help is needed, actually.

But I always want to invite newcomers who are positively interested into
our nice project with a friendly team.  The first I would like to recommend
is to subscribe our mailing list

   https://lists.debian.org/debian-med/

There might be some technical discussion, very frequently about
bioinformatics software which might not be your field of interest.  Feel
free to browse the web archive of previous postings first, whether this
is some information you can bear with.

> This might be brainstorming too far ahead, but I am wondering about a niche
> distro

Could you please explain your term "niche distro"?

The Debian Med project is definitely the contrary of a niche distro since
it is just plain Debian and we simply work with the Debian infra structure.
Debian and its well known derivatives Ubuntu, Mint and countless others
which all profit from the work of the Debian Med project (since it is pure
Debian) are the contrary than a niche distro.

I have seen in the past several Debian derivatives who maintained their
own repository of packages.  I'm observing this field since more than 20
years.  I have not seen a single one of these niche derivatives that
survived more than 10 years.  They have all one thing in common:  In the
beginning some very enthusiastic developers started with some higher
degree of freedom since they are not bound to all rules that are implied
by Debian policy.  In the run of the project they have spent a lot of
time into their cute project.  Later it turned out that they changed job,
interests, less spare time whatever and the project became orphaned.  The
best example under these projects is Biolinux which did a great job and
started to contribute directly to Debian somehow merging and thus saving
quite a bit of their work.

In short:  I'm a bit careful if I hear "niche distro" and would like to
hear what you might have in mind before I raise my opinion about this.

> coming pre-packaged with your EHR, Dicom, libre office, a browser,
> and webapp desktop links to uptodate, pubmed and so forth.  Target user
> would be medical, and it perhaps would be XFCE so that it could run on the
> thin client PC's we use in the hospital.

If you ask me you should check what you are actually missing inside Debian.
Could we possibly design some metapackages that simply install what you
want?  If you are wondering what metapackages might be:  These are defining
dependencies from other packages.  If you install a metapackage those
dependencies will be installed.  We have developed some web representation
of those metapackages and here you can see the metapackages designed by
the Debian Med team:

   https://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/

If you are missing some task or missing some depenency inside those
metapackages please let us know.

> I have an MX Linux distro that
> I built out that way for use w citrix and cerner and then I use it from a
> USB drive.  It has all the cacerts built in so it trusts Entrust
> certificate we use at work.  I was using snapshot to back it up w gnome
> disks, and realized, If I remove my username but keep all the mods, it's
> basically MX for medical use.

I do not know MX Linux and thus I can't judge about it.  You are able to
create live images from Debian as well if it is your main focus.
 
> so I did a repo search for medical in the .deb distros and that is how I
> found GNUmed.

Nice. :-)

> Imagine if we had a FOSS distro that could be put on limited hardware, for
> community hospitals that can't afford a $37 million dollar EHR, AND
> replace  Windows Licence.

Debian itself is not specifically designed for "limited" hardware.  On
the other hand it supports really cheap hardware like Raspberry Pi and
others.  Debian is not know for beeing specifically hungry for resources
and I've recently installed it on several low performance laptops
without any problem.

> The $37 million we spent on EHR at my hospital would have bought a lot of
> prenatal care and well child care, etc.  I am going to work this week to
> get an iso together of a live distro based on MX, with your EHR, and get
> the clinic visit software we use (webex), as well as skype and some
> others.  When I get the distro I will capture some screenshots and get them
> to you.

Good luck in doing so in any case.  Karsten might be more verbose about
the use of GNUmed in hospitals, thought.

Kind regards

     Andreas.
 
> > Hi Vance,
> >
> > I have pulled Andreas Tille into the loop because this
> >
> > > I have been using Linux, mostly Debian since 2012.  I have worked on I.T.
> > > for my hospital and for a time was Chief Medical Information Officer.
> > > I was quite pleased to see that someone is working on an EMR in the FOSS
> > > Arena, and wonder if I could contribute somehow.  I have no coding
> > > experience, but I build my own machines and use command line in Debian,
> > > Arch, Fedora when I use those systems.
> >
> > sounds like you might be interested in learning how to
> > package software for Debian, eventually taking over care for
> > the GNUmed debian packages currently being maintained by
> > Andreas Tille (who's got a few more hats to put on...) ?
> >
> > It likely doesn't require much coding experience and Andreas
> > is not unlikely to both appreciate help and offer counselling
> > on package maintenance.
> >
> > Does that pique your interest ?
> >
> > Beyond that there's also user-facing documentation to be
> > improved, as always. That would encompass your poking at
> > GNUmed (reporting bugs), delving into what can be done with
> > it, and writing some ASCIIDOC to tell others how to do so.
> >
> > Let us know.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de