On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 5:52 AM, Maccy <maccy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > A Fedora Astronomy distro 'proper' would be great, Speaking as a Fedora Board member for a moment. Inside the scope of the Fedora project...a proper Astronomy distro with its own release schedule and support cycle would be exceedingly difficult to establish. But I'm not sure that sort of effort is needed. We do have the ability to provide all the astronomy packages in Fedora as EPEL packages as long there is the manpower to do so. EPEL is meant to provide rebuilds of Fedora packages as addons to RHEL and its cousins, using the existing Fedora infrastructure. EPEL is meant to be far less aggressive in terms of updates, since its targeting the enterprise and its derivatives including the RHEL support timescale of 7 years. For Astronomy for EPEL to work effectively we need to have package maintainers who can reasonably make a multi-year commitment for the packaging workload. You make consider trying to become involved explicitly as an EPEL branch maintainer for some of the Astronomy software going into Fedora now. EPEL encourages potential maintainers, like yourself, to discuss adding EPEL maintenence duties with employers to try to establish it as an official job duty. > in addition to the Live > CD. Are there any plans for this? I would have to give it serious > consideration if a large number of packages that we use here are included, > such as the HEASOFT stuff, PyRAF/IRAF, and the Starlink Software > Collection. The ESO Scisoft collection would be a brilliant inclusion. There is always a need for more people to help by maintaining packages they are directly interested in using. If the software in question is licensing such that Fedora can include it, then the only thing stopping its inclusion is the manpower necessary to make it happen. I would very much encourage you to talk to your employer. If you have a compelling reason to make participating in Fedora and EPEL part of your job, you could be a valuable and very productive asset to the Astronomy SIG. > I know that a few of our UK counterparts are wholly using Fedora so I will > bring the project to their attention in case they have not discovered it > already. Yes please do, there will always be a need for active contributors to grow the available number of packages. -jef _______________________________________________ Fedora astronomy mailing list Fedora-astronomy-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Astronomy https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-astronomy-list
