[El] Some thoughts on cooperation

[Peter Hopfgartner]

There seems to be quite some movement in the GIS/RPM world recently.

As by now, there are at least 4 sources for RPM packages within RHEL/CentOS/Fedora, not to mention Mandrake, which has excellent GIS support and SuSE, which I do not know much about.

1 Fedora Linux
2 EPEL
3 Frank Warmerdam's FWTools
4 Enterprise Linux GIS

One question that arises is if we could reduce the number of sources for GIS rpm packages. I think, that this depends on the goals of each project. In my understanding, but I would ask each party to speak up for themself, the goals could be

Fedora Linux GIS: provide up to date OS GIS packages for current Fedora distributions
EPEL: provide OS GIS packages for Enterprise Linux, both stable as of software capability and as of software version
FWTools: I guess that at the time Frank was working on it it was a pioneering work of packaging quality OS GIS software into rpm
EL-GIS: proide stable software, as of software capability, but upgrade with caution the versions, in order to have up to date GIS software available for Enterprise Linux.

Basically, with thess goals, there is a reason to exists more then 1 repo.

The next question could be: could we benefit from each other? I do think so. If the goals are similar to what I speculated, a proposal might be:

We join forces to provide high quality GIS packages within Fedora GIS. EL-GIS packages will be derived with those Fedora packages, maybe with the minimum adaption needed to adapt them to the older software on the Enterprise platform (as might be Python, QT, Boost etc.). Basically, Fedora GIS will become the upstream for the packages.

Peter Hopfgartner
 
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