[ELGIS] Using Fedora Git for ELGIS

[Mathieu Baudier]

Hello,

as you know, quite a few GIS packages are available in EPEL
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL) and most our packaging work has
been around repackaging and backporting the Fedora packages (most of
them greatly maintained by Volker), in order to have more recent
versions.

So instead of maintaining our own Subversion repository [1], I have
been experimenting with the following approach:
- for each package, make a clone of the related Fedora Git repository
(one par package, which also contains a 'el6' branch, for EPEL)
- create a new branch 'elgis6' from the 'el6' branch
- merge from Fedora's 'master' branch
- adapt to EL6 (using the tips and tricks we already have in our spec
files in Subversion)

Benefits:
- make collaboration with Volker and other Fedora packagers much easier
- use mock --scm-enable command for reproducible builds at various
locations (I have tested it and will post an how-to soon)
- have people maintaining there own branch for specific purposes (I'm
thinking of R3, or even OpenGeo) with merges back and forth

I have already the latest stable geos working with this approach:
http://elgis.argeo.org/gitweb/

My plan is:
- to rebuild the core packages (geos, proj, GDAL, GRASS, PostGIS v1.x
and QGIS) this way
- move the current testing to stable
- publish the new packages to testing.

Thanks in advance for your comments,

Mathieu

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Enterprise_Linux_GIS#How_to_hack_and_locally_build_the_ELGIS_packages