[El] EL Interest

[Mathieu Baudier]

> I wanted to mention I have added this list info on the wiki page, and that
> I'm potentially interested in helping with some packaging if there is an
> appropriate build system available for shared use.   I must confess that I'm

I have just written a quick tutorial on how to checkout and hack the
spec files locally without using any build system:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Enterprise_Linux_GIS#How_to_hack_and_locally_build_the_custom_packages

The idea is that each package is organized like an rpmbuild area (with
SOURCES, SPECS etc.) and you just have to download the sources
archives in SOURCES and hack the spec files and the patches from the
working copy.

Regarding the build system, for the time being it is based on SLC
(which is a free/libre framework developed by argeo for
managing/automating systems). This is still of alpha quality and we
don't provide external access to it yet, but this is planned for the
next few months along with a more powerful infrastructure.

Anyhow the whole idea of SLC is to leverage existing approaches and
integrate them, so it rather work by calling SH scripts or generating
standard config files on the fly, so there is no dependency to it and
we (this list) may decide to move to another build system.

It currently works as follow:
- generate an SRPM from the SVN working copy
- build this SRPM in a mock environment
- gather the SRPM and the RPMs, copy them to a local/LAN directory,
update the repo meta data
We then regularly sync this local repo to the public server.

Please tell me if you want more details!

> not an experienced builder of RPMs.  I'd be interested primarily in GDAL
> and it's dependencies of course.

GDAL is typically a package that I would prefer to see maintained in EPEL.

They are still at v1.4.2:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/repoview/gdal.html

and that's why we repackaged it (we are currently at v1.6.3).

I plan to discuss soon with them the reasons and see if we could not
move our effort to EPEL.
Meanwhile feel free to have a look at our packaging (and criticize it!)