Mac Science Collaboration group

[Darren Weber]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 8:55 AM, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:

> James Kyle wrote:
> >> If you want a way to list and track science-related tickets, you can
> >> add a keyword such as "science" to tickets. Then you can use the
> >> ticket query wiki macro to list science tickets on the wiki page.  Or
> >> you can create a custom report that filters on the keyword (you
> >> probably need an admin to make the report for you).
> >
> > This sounds like a perfectly fine solution. The main idea simply being a
> > concerted effort toward the goal of a solid, maintained selection of
> > science applications.
> >
> > With the milestones, I think the idea was to present a unified front. Or
> > a higher degree of certainty that any given science/analysis/math
> > program will play nice with the other applications being worked on
> > within "science" scope. Would there be another means of accomplishing
> > this? Or would the idea of a "science tickets" wiki view be sufficient?
>
> Milestones are not tags, and Trac has recently been reconfigured to not
> abuse them as such. A special keyword would be the right tool here as
> Ryan suggested.
>
> - Josh
>


There is a port category for "science".  For example, although
InsightToolkit is primarily an image processing library, it contains many
"scientific" algorithms for image transformations and co-registration.  It's
primary category is "graphics", as it works on images, but in the Portfile
it can list many categories, so the current listing for this port contains:

categories       graphics math science devel

Anyhow, the purpose of the categories is to provide grouping or tagging of
ports.  A port has a primary category, and only one of these, because the
svn tree for port development is two directories deep, eg:

macports-trunk/dports/<category>/<portname>/Portfile

Hence, it's not only ports within the svn trunk or release tree under
.../dports/science/ that need to play well together.  Rather, it may be any
ports anywhere in the port tree that contain the "science" category in their
Portfile.

It may be true that category use in Portfiles is loosely defined, in the
sense that ports may be identified in some sense to belong to a field of
computing (games, office apps, editors, etc.).  I doubt that anyone uses a
category with a mindset that everything in that category should be a part of
an integrated build system.  In general, the hope is that the entire tree is
part of an integrated build system that is reliable and efficient, but to my
knowledge there is currently no focus on having within-category build
testing or anything of that sort.  A focus on science might help to direct
human resources to some extent.  From the discussion on this thread to date,
it appears the focus might be more on math than science generally.  I
suppose some intelligent analysis of the dependency tree will identify the
base libraries and applications that some large percentage of the science
apps depend on.  If those base libraries etc. are really well maintained and
build reliably and efficiently, the layers above should benefit from that.

Regards, Darren
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