[Mageia-discuss] Sciences in Mageia

[Juergen Harms]

Some more suggestions of candidates to consider:

PCB
The pcb printed-circuit design tool is certainly a good candidate - a 
must in my opinion. It is (one of) the best opensource tools in this 
kind, stable and powerful, with excellent documentation.

The target community of this tool is typically what is being discussed 
here - small egineering outfits, applications in R&D, soldering iron 
fans at home.

I have it running since many years, installed - without any problem - 
from the tarball downloaded from sourceforge.
GERBV
There is a second tool in this domain, which might also be considered: 
gerbv - a viewing tool for pcb data written in the gerber format (the 
probably most used standard for shipping pcb designs to manufacturers 
for printing end etching). Although this tool has declined in importance 
since gerber format integration into pcb has become perfect, 
nevertheless it is an excellent tool for double-checking that your pcb 
data shipped to the manufacturer is OK and not the cause for a multi-100 
dollar mistake.

AVRLIB
Avrlib is a set of tools (gcc crosscompiler, downloading, debugging) for 
microprocessor (Atmel family) development. Again, an execellent, well 
maintained and documented package, and - again - I have been using it 
for many years, installed from a tarball.

see:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pcb/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gerbv/
http://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/

I did not put these packages into packaging request since I am perfectly 
happy with my tarballs and since I am not sure whether there are other 
users - this viewpoint changes if there is a "strategic interest" for 
having such packages available for easy install from rpm repositories 
(and to publicise that there is no problem making them run in Mageia).

Before investing into adding/supporting a new package, how about 
launching some kind of poll to assess the interest for that package? But 
if Mageia decides on making "science&engineering tools" one of its 
domains of excellence, offering a good package is, in my eyes, justified 
even with momentarily 0-usage - possibly for a limited period of time. 
On the other hand, the risk of producing a cemetery of unworshipped 
heros is something that should be avoided

In case some of these packages should come on board, I am certainly 
willing to give a hand in making it work in Mageia.