Project:Science/Overlay

The Gentoo Science Project officially maintains the science overlay which holds many ebuilds for scientific and high performance clustering applications. It is used as a sandbox for the main tree scientific packages, as a repository of not widely used scientific software and to allow contributions of non Gentoo developers.

Access to the science overlay
The science overlay repository is maintained with git, maintained on two sites:
 * on Gentoo
 * on GitHub

We keep them both synchronized. The overlay can be accessed or installed the usual way.

Hosted Projects
We are hosting a few experimental (admittedly forever) projects on the science overlay:
 * alternatives-2: automatic generation of eselect modules, used to handle multiple blas/lapack implementations (non-documented)
 * Empi: handling multiple MPI implementations

Contributions
We strongly encourage contributions rather than bugs for the science overlay. You can contribute via GitHub interface, or send us an [mailto:sci@gentoo.org email] asking for commit access to the Gentoo hosted repository, with a reference to your contribution(s). Visit our Contributing page for more details.

The Quality Assurance on overlays is not as strictly enforced as on our main tree; however we recommend doing the following minimum on the contributed ebuilds:
 * Use the latest EAPI and use existing eclasses
 * Fill diligently the metadata.xml: adding yourself as maintainer, add a long description and a upstream tag. A typical template can be found on the skel.metadata.xml file.
 * Run  to verify your ebuild, and   to commit
 * To synchronize both gentoo and github account, add something like the following snippet to of the .git/config file of your cloned repository:


 * Check more tips from the KDE project.

Reporting issues

 * If pull requests scare you, you can report issues for the science overlay packages on the GitHub tracker.
 * If you insist on reporting bugs through the traditional Gentoo way, the field "Summary" of the bug should be:



Note that many of the science overlay contributors do not follow the Gentoo Bugzilla.

Scientific overlays
Here is list of well maintained overlays for scientific users of Gentoo:
 * sage-on-gentoo: install the SAGE notebook on Gentoo (need the science overlay)
 * octave: install octave-forge packages with a Gentoo package manager
 * roverlay: an automatically generated overlay of R packages (available in layman as "roverlay")