Re: suggestion for educational software section

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

> John Lapeyre <lapeyre@physics.arizona.edu> writes:
> >*cjt@engr.uark.edu wrote:
> >> I think that debian should make a software section specifically for
> >> educational software. 
> ...
> >does a science tool that is suitable for education go into 'science' or
> >'education' ?
> 
> Exactly.  For most purposes, I think "education" would be the wrong
> category.  If it's a science tool, then put it under "science".
> Otherwise, we would have to draw artificial distinctions, like saying
> that material for grammar schools goes under "education", but that for
> higher grades can go under "science".  Or maybe the threshold should
> be between high school and college.  Messy.
[snip]

I'm jumping into the middle of this discussion, but I've read the archives
so hopefully I won't sound completely out of place.

Earlier Joey said that an educational section "would be great, if we had any
packages to put in it." I'm the leader of the Simple End-User Linux project
(SEUL, at www.seul.org), and one of our projects is the seul educational
project (www.seul.org/edu/). We've got a half dozen or a dozen programs that
I'm looking into packaging. We host development for DrGeo (drgeo.seul.org --
it was mentioned earlier in this thread as the example of an educational
software package) and several others larger projects.

I'm not going to take a side on whether you guys should make a new category
for educational vs scientific (vs math). I just want to package the things:
given that we're developing/collecting new ones, I'm pretty close to the
authors/source.

But I haven't made any Debian packages before. I think I just successfully
packaged xletters, but I'm going to poke at it some more before I claim that
I did. Once I figure things out, the rest should follow pretty easily (heh).
If any of you have particular interest in educational applications, and
clue in making debs, please contact me and maybe we can help divide up some
work. I have way too many things going on these days, so this project will
be a little slow in coming.

Thanks,
--Roger