[ELGIS] Next steps on ELGIS 6

[Mathieu Baudier]

Hi Nikos,

in general, all information about ELGIS should be available or accessible here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Enterprise_Linux_GIS

You can use the discussion page to point out missing, incomplete our
outdated information.

> because we start having lots of plus and testing versions
> can we have some instructions which repos are dependent on
> and what extra configuration have these versions?

I'm sorry if it sounds complicated, I probably did not explain it
properly, because it is not.

- each repository comes in two: testing and stable
  - packages in testing are already of good quality and I would expect
most people following this list to use them (that's what I do)
  - each new version of a package (upstream update or new build
options added) goes first to testing then after a while is moved to
stable

The idea is that people who follow closely ELGIS will have very
quickly the latest versions in testing.
While those people who just pick up the stable repo and move on will
have something which has already been used in real life but with a
delay.

- in ELGIS5 there is an elgis-plus repo (and therefore an
elgis-plus-testing) which is for software which requires to change the
base OS (RHEL/CentOS/SL).
- there is no such elgis-plus repo in ELGIS6 since there is no need at
this stage.

The CentOS and the RPMForge projects also provides such separate repos
for software which make you're software not anymore compatible by RHEL
(and thus not supported by Red Hat)
I hope that we (ELGIS) will be able to convince the upstream projects
to at least support the latest Enterprise Linux release. So that we
don't need an elgis-plus repo anymore.

Last but not least:
- we now have two releases (ELGIS5 and ELGIS6) so it multiplies a lot
of things by two (thankfully not elgis-plus, see above)

I guess that's what is puzzling you.

> how we submit new spec files into a git or svn repo?

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Enterprise_Linux_GIS#If_you_want_to_contribute_packages_to_the_ELGIS_repo

If you want to maintain a package (GDAL?), I'd be more than happy to
give you commit rights to SVN.

Maintaining a package implies:
- following upstream updates, trying to have new stable versions ASAP in testing
- maintaining ELGIS5 as well (even you don't use it...)
- coordinate with upstream Fedora packagers (typically Volker) to make
sure our spec files are the closest (preferably identical) with them
- keep information on http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Enterprise_Linux_GIS accurate
- notify the list

If others are interested in "formally" (as above) maintaining a
package, be sure I'd be happy to be relieved of them so your are of
course welcome!
If you don't mind, I will just always make sure we do rather less but
that we do it well.

I'm toying for a while with the idea of having the spec files in Git,
typically on GitHub.

Benefits would be:
- code not anymore hosted by argeo.org but on a public standard platform
- easy to fork/merge for people who want to maintain slightly
different versions (e.g. PostGIS for PostgreSQL 9.x?)

I'm not keen on doing technical improvements for the sake of them,
while the current solution is working not too bad.
So I would rather focus on finishing the changes related to EL6, in
order to have a clean basis, and then we could move to Git.

> my opinion is to define goals we want to achieve and pass the test versions
> to stable

What prevents the current version to move to stable in your opinion?
Isn't it good "enough" ?

Cheers,

Mathieu