Thursday 28 November 2013

Bits from Debian Med team (by Andreas Tille)

Some of these bits are a bit outdated but there is no point in hiding this information just because it is old.

FOSDEM talk

Andreas Tille had a talk at FOSDEM which is also Video recorded. A quite similar but updated talk was held at DebConf 13 (see below).

Jabber interview by reporter from India

There was an interesting interview between Rajeev Nair and Andreas Tille at So, 17.02.2013 Rajeev Nair is Business head of an health care journal in India held via jabber. Since this might serve as some nice FAQ about Debian Med here is a complete log of this interview (permission to publish it was granted).

Article about Debian Med

As a consequence of the interview above the Debian Med team has assembled an article which was originally intended to be published in the Health Cafe journal but somehow this never happened. So we ended up with a nice article targeting at interested readers about Free Software in medicine with not necessarily informatics background. Since the article is considered to be of good quality and has consumed some time of several team members we are seeking for ideas for relevant places where to publish it. It is available as PDF as well as in SVN.

Yearly sprint of Debian Med team

This year we had our third sprint of the Debian Med team and all participants consider it a great success again. The sprint was in end of February and the individual reports are linked from the according wiki page. Since Andreas Tille was able to prove the nice effect of having face to face meetings in Debian teams in the team metrics graphs presented in his talks at DebConf (see below) we will keep on with this good tradition. The next sprint is scheduled for Friday 31st January until Sunday 2nd February in Stonehaven near Aberdeen. If you are interested to meet the people behind Debian Med and want to join us in developing packages which are helpful in health care and bioinformatics you are invited to join us.

DebConf 13 in Vaumarcus

Andreas Tille had two talks with specific influence to Debian Med development(Debian Med as a success story for other Blends, How to attract new developers for your team (MoM, SoB). For those who want to read a full (and lengthy) report about DebConf 13 by Andreas Tille this is online in this blog article.

Codefest of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation

Ivo Maintz and Steffen Möller organised the Codefest of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation in Berlin. About 40 contributors from all over the world attended, connecting the Debian community strongly with upstream. The event triggered a joint paper of participants to Sprints, Codefests and Hackathons alike, presented at the Nettab conference on Semantic, Social, and Mobile Applications for Bioinformatics and Biomedical Laboratories in Venice.

Reupload unattended packages

Andreas Tille has mentored the GSoC student Emmanouil Kiagias and as a byproduct some Blends metadata were now kept in UDD. This has inspired some new tools and one of this was an UDD query to return all packages in the interest of the Blend ordered by date when they were uploaded. It has shown that there were packages hanging around in the package pool since five years. So some effort was done to check those packages which were not necessarily "buggy" according to BTS entries and so we were able to fix the following issues in about 20-30 packages:

  • Remove DM-Upload-Allowed fields
  • hardening
  • canonical Vcs fields
  • checking homepages / watch files
  • checking policy 3.9.4 (cme fix dpkg-control)
  • profit from xz compression in binary packages which makes perfectly sense in some of our packages
  • DEP5
  • DEP3
  • use dh consequently to simplify things for team members / NMUers
  • finally upload several changes in VCS but remained UNRELEASED
  • found several other hidden issues like
Since it was impressive how many things that deserve fixing are hidden in such long unattended packages it is recommended also to other teams to spend some time into these. The UDD query can be easily tweaked for a team maintainer address.

Debian Med Bug Squashing Advent Calendar 2013

The Debian Med team will again do the Bug Squashing Advent Calendar. Feel free to join us in our bug squashing effort where we close bugs while other people are opening doors. :-)

Kind regards and see you at Debian Med sprint
Andreas.

1 comment:

  1. Quite impressive post it is. Specially the article about Debian Med is very nice.You have mentioned a very systematic and informative post. Thanks for the post. medical second opinion in India

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