[El] proj, GDAL, MapServer, mod_geocache updated in testing

[Mathieu Baudier]

Hello,

our release strategy is to concentrate significant updates of the
ELGIS repositories around the minor releases of the Enterprise Linux
platform (based on the CentOS releases).

With CentOS 5.6 now available, here are already some important ones:

# proj
- proj now requires proj-epsg, as discussed here:
http://www.osgeo.org/pipermail/el/2010-November/000161.html
- proj-nad has been updated to 1.5

# geos
- has been rebuilt against EL 5.6 without changes

# gdal
- upgraded to 1.8.0
- gdal-iioext removed
=> use 'yum remove gdal-iioext' if you have it installed
- fixed multilibs conflict
=> no gdal-java.i386 and gdal-python.i386 anymore for x86_64, but
gdal.386 and gdal.x86_64 now work together
(many more details about GDAL at the end of this mail)
Thanks to Nikolaos for his contribution!

# mapserver
- updated to 5.6.6
- php bindings now use the php53 package introduced in EL 5.6
Thanks to Peter for his contribution!

# mod_geocache
- upgraded to 0.2.1
Thanks to Peter for his contribution!

That would be great to push these packages to stable fairly quickly,
so don't hesitate to test them over the next few weeks.

I will now work on QGIS (the new version of the hplip package now
requires sip which is conflicting with python26-sip... I will try to
make python26-sip non conflicting with the original sip) and on some
more experimental packages (osm2pgsql, mapnik, etc.)

Cheers,

Mathieu

# More details about some choices around GDAL

- upgraded to 1.8.0:
After quite a few trials in various directions, I finally decided to
update the 1.7.3 we were still working on because some features had
been added (e.g. PCRaster) since the 1.7.2 version upon which Nikolaos
based his work.
But having the working version of Nikolaos was very helpful and helped
me to solve some weird issues which had been introduced when trying to
maintain a single spec file with Fedora. (see below for more details
about the collaboration with Fedora)

- gdal-iioext removed
Together with Ralph, we reviewed in details the work that had been
done around the Java bindings and realized that it was probably not
necessary to have both gdal-java and gdal-iioext (wich was basically
the same with patches from the imageio-ext project).
Now, our approach is to maintain a single gdal-java, and make sure
that it is compatible with imageio-ext since this will be what we will
use for geotools, geoserver, etc.
As usual, feel free to discuss this approach as long as they are still
in the testing repo.

- Collaboration with Fedora
With regard to the tentative maintenance of a single spec file across
Fedora, ELGIS and EPEL, we had reached a point where this was making
an already complex spec file even more complex for everybody to
maintain. The approach is now for Fedora to innovate much more freely
and we will take care to merge their work, rather than trying to
maintain a single spec file.
Feel free to discuss this as well of course.

NOTE: for the time being I have removed the ref manual generation and
the automated test in order to fasten the build time.
I also want to spend a bit more time digging into why some automated
tests are failing (or, worse, hanging...) before deactivating them.
This is pretty clear that not all will pass (there are quite a few
TIFF failures probably related to the known issues with libtiff
already discussed onb the list) but I would like to know more
precisely which ones and ask the upstream developers.
This would be interesting to know which features are not supported on
our platform by leveraging upstream work on these tests.