[Beowulf] [jtang at tchpc.tcd.ie: Re: Commercial programs in Debian]

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Jimmy Tang <jtang at tchpc.tcd.ie> -----

From: Jimmy Tang <jtang at tchpc.tcd.ie>
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 17:16:32 +0100
To: Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo at informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>
Cc: "Gudjon I. Gudjonsson" <gudjon at mc2.chalmers.se>,
	debian-amd64 <debian-amd64 at lists.debian.org>
Subject: Re: Commercial programs in Debian
User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i

Hi,


On Sat, May 06, 2006 at 04:47:10PM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> "Gudjon I. Gudjonsson" <gudjon at mc2.chalmers.se> writes:
> 
> > Hi
> >    Sorry for the disturbion but I would like to mention some things.
> > I have been thinking about if it was possible to set up some bug list as a 
> > kind of quality assurance for commercial programs in Debian. Most commercial 
> > programs I have seen are only said to be compatible with RedHat and sometimes 
> > SuSe. Such a list might make it more interesting for the companies to port 
> > their applications to Debian and it would definetly make my life easier:). Is 
> > it possible for example to make a pseudo package to install in Debian with 
> > the name of the program that makes apt-listbugs retrieve all bugs for that 
> > program when the system is upgraded?
> >    Perhaps such an idea has already appeared on the internet but I did not 
> > find it.
> >
> > Sincerely
> > Gudjon
> 
> I think an alioth project might be better. You could host patches to
> the installer scripts, bug tracking, an ML, ...
> 
---end quoted text---


That would be an interesting idea to do, we're actually running debian
sarge amd64 on our opteron cluster (with some dirty hacks at various
parts of the kernel and our networking stacks)

at where I work, we've been thinking about packaging up some of the
academic codes (things like vasp, cpmd, smeagol etc...) as deb's to
make life easier to roll packages out to compute nodes.

compiling things up and then fitting the compiled package into a "deb"
is pretty easy to do. perhaps it might be an idea to setup a package
with the "debian" control files as examples with a set of instructions
on how to build the resulting packages might be useful. i don't see
quite a few of the vendors for some of the software in question who are
too willing to make their codes too publicaly available for whatever
reasons. though this is probably going against the more philosophical
views of what people would want for debian itself.

but I find that most applications are pretty easy/straightforward in
getting them to work under debian amd64, the only obscurities that i
have come across are usually commercial compiler dependant problems
(portland/intel/pathscale compilers for fortran90/fortran95 codes)

unfortunately, there are often no alternatives to some of the commercial
codes and scientific reasearch codes thats out there that people want to
use. unless one wants to develop one themselves which may not always be
a viable option

what would be nicer, is if it were possible to somehow get the suse/redhat
enterprise kernels and cleanly unpack and translate the packages to a
debian kpkg system. what we often found was its not usually the codes that
we want to run that causes us the problem, its some of the underlying
hardware/software drivers that come in binary blobs which causes us the
most problems

well the above is just my own opinions and i hope i did not tread on
anyones toes :)

Jimmy

-- 
Jimmy Tang
Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing,
Lloyd Building, Trinity College Dublin.
http://www.tchpc.tcd.ie/


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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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