[ELGIS] Introduction of Enterprise Linux GIS 6 - Latest stable versions of geos, geotiff, GDAL, postgis, gpsbabel, GRASS, QGIS in elgis-6-testing

[Mathieu Baudier]

Hello,

ELGIS repositories for RHEL/CentOS/SL 6 have been introduced.
For the time being, packages are only available in testing and for x86_64.

The latest stable versions of our "core" packages have been built
(except MapServer, see below):
- geos 3.3.0
- libgeotiff 1.3.0
- gdal 1.8.1
- postgis 1.5.3
- gpsbabel 1.4.2
- grass 6.4.1
- qgis 1.7.0

Please note that the versions of geos, libgeotiff, gdal, gpsbabel and
qgis are higher than those currently available in EPEL/ELGIS 5.

# TESTING IT
sudo rpm -Uvh http://elgis.argeo.org/repos/6/elgis-release-6-6_0.noarch.rpm

Then enable the elgis-testing repository in
/etc/yum.repos.d/elgis-testing.repo (since [elgis] is currently
empty).

# NOTES
- We are not using anymore ".elgis" in %{dist} (as in ".el5.elgis").
The experience has shown that it makes the cooperation with Fedora and
EPEL much more difficult since this value is often used in %if in the
spec files in order to have single specs files across the various
distributions.
This will also probably soon be the case in ELGIS 5 as well

- I did not build 'mapserver' and 'mapserver6' because we should
decide which version we plan to support and how to name it.
Ideas (especially from the MapServer users / packagers) are welcome.

# WARNINGS
- This is a first batch of packages and the process is not completely
streamlined.
Even though there is no reason why they should not work well, use with
caution and please report issues to the list.

- Packages for i386 will be built later on. Don't hesitate to ask if
you need them sooner.

- Documentation, wiki page, etc. have not yet been updated.
As of today, only http://elgis.argeo.org/ has been updated with
install instructions.

# BAD PERFORMANCE ?
I did a quick test importing the NaturalEarthData countries shapefile
into PostGIS and visualizing it in QGIS and the performance is very
bad. I have not investigated yet, but I wonder if it could not be due
to the upgrade of geos to 3.3.0.
I would therefore be very interested in your feedback on performance
with your own environments and data.

# THANKS
Many thanks to Micha for documenting over the last few months his own
builds in his blog (http://www.surfaces.co.il), it definitely saved me
a lot of time.

Full credits of course to the Fedora packagers who are doing all the
hard work, especially to Volker (most packages are simple rebuilds of
his SRPMs currently under review by Fedora/EPEL).

# A MILESTONE
A little more than one year now that the ELGIS repositories are
providing the latest stable versions of the free GIS software for
Enterprise Linux.
I can feel that EL6 will be a great platform for GIS.

Cheers,

Mathieu