[OSGeo-Discuss] Request for a new project: GIS for Enterprise Linux

[Mathieu Baudier]

>> Could you please elaborate on that?
>> Do you think of server or of desktops?
> Desktops.
> To get to core GIS server functionality on CentOS 5.x isn't so hard even
> today, I believe. You may need to compile mapserver, gdal, but most of the
> libraries are available, no?

Yes you're perfectly right.
But even if compiling locally does work, having the components as RPM
has advantages (easier to manage, no need for a compiler on the host,
etc.)

As I said in the original mail, a lot already exist in the EPEL repo,
and our goal would be to support their maintainers rather than
duplicate the effort.

> But for desktop GIS, when you have to advance to Qt4 and a whole string of
> python stuff, it starts to get hairy.

I see your point.
Actually this has been the most difficult exercise so far: rebuilding
and repackaging Qt4 so that QGIS could work on CentOS 5.
They are still indeed some issues with Python, that I'll be happy to
discuss in more details when we have set up a mailing list. We'll
probably need to upgrade Python as well (I know that some repos offer
upgraded Python).