Ubuntu Science Documentation

[Phil Bull]

Hi John,

On Mon, 2009-06-08 at 12:56 -0500, jhaitas at gmail.com wrote:
> I've got the MATLAB (http://help.ubuntu.com/community/MATLAB) updated
> to cover the latest version. I have received requests to cover
> specific problems with the install and I have since addressed them.
> One item of note is that I was contacted by someone on the Octave team
> requesting that I put a link to the Octave project on the MATLAB page
> (we had decided in IRC that Octave is not quite a FLOSS analog for
> MATLAB). I respectfully told him as much and encouraged him to stay in
> touch, I haven't heard from him since.

It might be appropriate to mention Octave as being *similar* to MATLAB
in some respects, despite not being a drop-in replacement. However,
Octave has its own wiki page, so there's not really any need.

> I have been dabbling in SciPy, NumPy and Matplotlib. I think it could
> be worth documenting these packages in a Science or Mathematics
> section - they seem to be poised to be a very powerful alternative to
> MATLAB in the not-so-distant future. Do you think it would be worth
> developing a Science or Mathematics section in the wiki where all of
> these options and their strengths are presented to the user?

Yes, scipy et al. would definitely be a good fit for coverage in the
science section of the wiki [1]. However, I think that only a brief
overview of each of the packages is needed as far as the Ubuntu
documentation is concerned. Those projects already have extensive
in-house documentation, and there's no need to duplicate that.

Thanks,

Phil

[1] - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuScience

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/people/philbull