[ELGIS] Some clarifications on the ELGIS effort and the ELGIS repository hosted by Argeo

[Mathieu Baudier]

Hello,

I am Mathieu (Baudier), the "maintainer" of the ELGIS RPM repository hosted
by Argeo GmbH.

As you have noticed and, as has been stated on this list already, as a
commercial organization, we currently don't have the resources or rationale
to update this public repository. We still have an interest in this field,
and there may be visible progress on this soon, but please don't hold your
breath. It will be ready when it will be ready. Anyone who went through the
release of CentOS 6 will know what this means.

Meanwhile, we have at least strived to keep the existent binaries available
in a consistent state (there was a one or two days outage two years ago)
and the git repositories ready to be forked. These git repositories are
themselves direct forks from Fedora's repositories, in a systematic manner.
Fedora packagers have done a tremendous job over the last years in order to
keep compatibility with Enterprise Linux (thanks Volker!), thus removing a
lot of the original motivation for ELGIS, which started on CentOS 5, when
you had to repackage down to Python UI libraries to get some stuff running.

@Markus I very much appreciated your private mail a few days ago regarding
SSL (much less that you discuss on a public mailing-list the security of an
infrastructure that we graciously provide for years to the OSGeo
Foundation). I hereby admit that I have made a serious mistake, but which
impacts only a part of our infrastructure separated from the rest, down to
the public IP level. Our core and customer infrastructures were not
affected, and have been updated against Heartbleed as soon as CentOS
provided the patches. On this particular infrastructure, we host only free
and open source software for the community. And over there, SSL is, well,
of no use. (Yes, I should disable it... Anyhow, it is fixed now).

Hosting (an)other ELGIS repository(ies)? Sure, why not. If you want my
opinion, this is what we should actually all be doing. Indeed, there is a
real problem here : do we want the latest version, or do we want stability?
IMHO the answer is : "it depends". A few weeks ago, I delivered a
non-critical project based on the current ELGIS, where a lot of geodata
were processed successfully. Some time ago, we delivered a project where we
packaged not-yet-released or patched versions of some of our beloved free
GIS software.

At this stage, we, Argeo, are more interested in providing a way to make it
easier to fork back and forth, also at binary level. I appreciate that it
would be more convenient for many to rather have right now a steadily
delivered stream of updates to his/her current settings, but this will just
be a side-effect of what we will be delivering (when it will be ready).
Meanwhile, it is possible to manage GIS data on RHEL/CentOS/SL after just a
few yum install (my main personal goal back then), and there is an open
basis upon which anyone can build.

This mailing-list, the trac repository and the wiki, are part of the OSGeo
foundation, which was not in a position to provide RPM hosting when all
this was started. It was always stated that the purpose of this effort was
free GIS software on Enterprise Linux *in general* and not only "the" ELGIS
RPM repo, but also : tips and tricks about EPEL, or how to deploy manually
Java software such as GeoServer, etc. I am of course happy to share or
transfer administration of the mailing-list or of the trac instance (anyone
with an OSGeo account can improve the wiki...)

Peter, Volker, Markus or Ralph, that I met personally already, can get
write SSH access to the hosting infrastructure and git repositories at any
time, if they wish to. But, more efficiently, and as I have written here
already, I am ready to merge, build and deploy upgrading patches if : they
come from the git repositories *and have been tested in mock*.

Finally, yes, this broken amandrillo dependency is tiring. I would fix it
only to spare me these --skip-broken, but then I would be afraid to raise
expectations that I could not fulfil. I would almost have been upset with
EPEL for breaking this, while not providing the great and latest GIS from
Fedora. But I know that what they are trying to achieve is difficult.

Cheers,

Mathieu
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