[GRASS-dev] WinGRASS Wiki Hacking

[Frank Warmerdam]

Glynn Clements wrote:
> I downloaded the installer and, yes, that's exactly what I was
> suggesting that GRASS should be doing. It shouldn't be necessary to
> re-download dozens of third-party libraries with every GRASS snapshot
> or release candidate.
> 
> It would be particularly useful if it could be extended for use by
> developers as well as end users, by including the MinGW/MSys
> development environment (gcc, make, flex, bison etc).

Glynn,

OSGeo4W does endevour to include the stub libraries and include files
for the packages (such as libpng, etc).  I hadn't contemplated including
the MingW before, but I wouldn't mind including it if someone wanted
to package it.

> One thing which I'm curious about: is it necessary to host all of the
> packages on a common server? I know that the setup.ini file normally
> only contains pathnames. Is that a restriction of setup.exe?

I do not know a way of having packages come from different locations.

I have certainly wanted some means of "federated respositories" for
a variety of reasons.  First, I would like a mechanism to support
"non-free" packages external to OSGeo that I don't feel it is right
for OSGeo to host.  Second, I'd like a way of using OSGeo4W to
deliver custom content to particular clients of mine.

Unfortunately, while I have made noteworthy changes to the setup
program, I have found it a somewhat challenging environment to
work in.

 >  Is it
> something which would be easy to change? Would it be feasible to
> configure the web server to use HTTP redirects to have non-OSGeo
> packages (TIFF, JPEG, PNG, etc) retrieved from the original site?

This could work in theory, but is still leaves a challenge to build
the setup.ini from these packages in different places.  Currently the
setup.ini generation script makes a pass over a particular directory
tree.

I'd add that stuff like TIFF, JPEG and PNG still need to be "packaged"
as the final packages need a particular directory layout, and need
to be packaged as a .tar.bz2 file.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org