Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost> writes: Your question is about pkgsrc, not NetBSD, so I have trimmed the lists. > I am curious (only curious - this is not a complaint): Does anyone > know why there ended up being a pretty well-fleshed-out 'biology' > section in pkgsrc but there isn't "chemistry", "physics", > "engineering" etc... > > Was there some prodigious pkgsrc maintainer/hacker who was a biologist > or is it just that there happen to be more biology-related programs > which justify the discrete category? I am 98% sure it was just that someone was motivated to add lots of computational biology programs. Maybe Brook will speak up :-) There are a lot of radio/RF programs in ham; same reason but more diffuse (more people). There is also cad and geography, for specific non-computer topics, and parallel for a computer topic that seems to have a similar raison d'etre. This sort of thing can easily happen if there is someone on the computing staff of a biology place who decides that pkgsrc is the best way to manage the software that the science customers expect. My understanding is that some part of NASA uses pkgsrc for this reason (on GNU/Linux systems). If you wanted to go on a packaging rampage and add chemistry or physics that's probably fine. "engineering" seems too vague a category to be useful, given what we have already, although we have math.
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