[OSGeo-Discuss] Distribution Special Interest Groups

[Silke Reimer]

On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 08:00:28AM -0300, pmarc wrote:
> 2006/3/8, Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter at gmail.com>:
> > It sounds like there is a need for a "OSGeo Distribution" project whose
> > mission is to build OSGeo projects into different distributions?
> 
> This sounds a bit like duplication of effort, IMHO.
> It should be better to coordinate this with distro-related projects,
> like Debian-GIS.
> People there are working hard to get updated packages under Debian
> Repositories.

The main problem is not to get the packages unter a Debian
Repository but to fed them into official Debian distribution. BTW:
This should be done for distributions like Fedora as well in my
opinion. If every FC packager announces his packages on Fedora
Extra other packagers could do their work based on them instead of
beginning from scratch.

> 
> I do not know how these things work in the real world, but maybe
> converting existing .deb packages to rpm with alien should do...
> Probably better than the other way around... Someone knowledgeable
> please correct me.

Unfortunately your suggestion is not feasible. It is even worse: You
have to build RPMS for each RPM-based distribution: Fedora, SuSE,
Mandrive etc.  The reason lies in the management of package
dependencies. The libraries that are necessary to build and run a
package are named differently in each distribution. Also the
versions that are available differ between the distributions.

So: I think as well that we need something like an "OSGEO
Distribution" project. As I already wrote: We can provide the
necessary technical infrastruture on top of a gforge portal if you
are interested. We could rather easily start with it and then apply
to become an official OSGEO project.

Many greetings,

    Silke

-- 
Silke Reimer   : www.intevation.de/~silke | GISpatcher: www.gispatcher.de
Intevation GmbH: www.intevation.de        | Thuban    : thuban.intevation.org
Georgstr.4     : 49074 Osnabrück          | FreeGIS   : www.freegis.org
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