Google and Debian work together to make COVID-19 researchers’ lives easier

In a collaborative effort to support COVID-19 researchers, Google and Debian have worked together to make essential software tools more accessible by packaging Bazel for easy installation on Debian and Ubuntu systems. This initiative, led by Debian Developer Olek Wojnar and Google's Yun Peng, aims to deliver Tensorflow Machine Learning functionality to the medical community, addressing the urgent need for better research tools amid the pandemic. The Bazel team and Debian volunteers successfully packaged the Bazel bootstrap variant within six months, with its availability coinciding with the releases of Debian 11 and Ubuntu 21.04. The ongoing collaboration also focuses on advancing the packaging and distribution of Tensorflow for Debian and other Linux distributions, with contributions from several team members including Michael R. Crusoe, Joe Hicks, John Field, Philipp Wollermann, and Tobias Werth.