[OSGeo-Discuss] Library incompatibilities

[Ned Horning]

Hi - 

I have some questions about library version incompatibilities when using Linux
OSGeo desktop applications. I am trying to force myself to use a broader array
of open source geo packages for my daily tasks but the more packages I use the
more headaches I have trying to manage conflicting libraries. For example, GDAL
is used by just about all geo projects (for good reason) but different projects
use different versions of GDAL or the same version compiled differently and
distributed on different repositories. I spend a good bit of time tracking down
these conflicts with help from colleagues and I'm  wondering if other folks
have similar problems and if you are how do you deal with it. I'm still not
all that capable using Linux and I suppose that's one of the problems but it
just seems like it shouldn't be this difficult especially when my other FOSS
applications seem to get along with each other just fine. 

It would be nice to be able to pick and choose appropriate software for a specific
task (I always considered that to be a strength of FOSS) but in practice I'm
having a hard time doing that. Here is a list of what I'd like to be loaded
on my Ubuntu system and this will certainly grow as I get more familiar with
other packages: OSSIM, GRASS, QGIS, FWTools, and R. 

Ned