In addition to all the siblings; this is also important in research - which increasingly uses computers. If you provide a paper, source code, dataset and descri

In addition to all the siblings; this is also important in research - which increasingly uses computers. If you provide a paper, source code, dataset and description of the system(s) used - can someone reproduce your research? It would certainly be convenient if you can point to a version/snapshot of Debian (or another distribution) - and it would then be possible to take your (say C) source code and compile and run the same binary used for research. It's true that often getting the algorithm more-or-less right is enough - but the more research is augmented by computing devices, the more important it becomes to maintain reproducibility - and the more complex and capable these computer devices (say a top-100 supercomputer, software stack in C++ on top of MPI, some Fortran numeric libraries etc) become - the harder it becomes to maintain it. Imagine verifying research done today by repeating experiments in 50 years.