I just moved to Grenoble(France) during the last two weeks : administration, appartement, meeting the new co-workers, setting up at my new university.
Yup I got a professor position at the university Joseph Fourier (IMAG) last July and I started Sept 1st. My main research interests are in scientific computing, numerical methods and modern programming techniques. Now you understand why I would be interested in a project like pkg-scicomp in Debian.
When moving, I discovered that other DD were in Grenoble : Rafael Laboissi re, Christian Marillat, and a few others. Hopefully we will meet soon :)
In the pkg-scicomp project a few packages are in progress<br /><br /><ul><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">freefem++</span> a very powerful language to solve pde, right now the remaining issue is updating all files and fix the licence/copyright</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">trilinos</span> a meta-package that contains many numerical libraries with an emphasis on robust parallel algorithms. Right now 6.0.19 is in the box, I think I will wait for the version 7<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">parmetis</span> well parametis is already taken care of by hazelsct but I wanted to modify it and provide some headers from metis. Patches will be sent to hazelsct.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">arprec</span> an arbitrary precision numerical type in C++, I need to update to the last version which fixed licensing issues</li></ul>I am happy that it is possible to have a large numerical software suite in Debian which you will have difficulties to find in any other distro.
I started recently the project pkg-scicomp on <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-scicomp/">Alioth</a> to federate and maintain packaging efforts for scientific computing software. Quite a few packages are maintained in a subversion repository<br /><a href="http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-scicomp">svn.debian.org</a>. Most packages already made it to the Debian/GNU/Linux archive and a few other are still work in progress because of licensing issues or unfinished packaging.<br /><br />If you have some interest in scientific computing and are a Debian user, I invite you to participate to this project.