[Incubator] Application OSGeo - GISCollective

[Bogdan Szabo]

Hi Greg and everyone,

Thank you for taking the time to give us feedback Greg. I see your point related to the guides. It makes a lot of sense. Related to that we managed to update our guide at https://guide.giscollective.com/ . I hope that the developer guides are more visible and make more sense now.

All the data that is added to the platform can be imported/exported as a user using geojson, geopackage and csv. This is a feature that we are looking to improve, and we are looking forward for getting more feedback from the osgeo community. We still need to write the user guides for this feature since they are not 100% complete.

Related to the installation and pushing packages to the packaging systems, so far nobody was interested in running outside a docker container and we considered that is good enough for now. Initially when we started the project we were building .deb and .rpm packages 

but it was taking a lot of effort in maintaining them and we were deploying the apps using containers anyway, and we stopped maintaining them. If someone is interested in using those packages or if they want to use another system we would be happy to support it. Based on your feedback, I also started to add documentation on how to build the projects from scratch here: https://guide.giscollective.com/en/Develop/

Related to who has or does not have commit rights anyone who follows this steps https://guide.giscollective.com/en/develop/CONTRIBUTING/#merge-request-guidelines can contribute. Do you think that there is any missing information on this page? Do you have any thoughts about how can we clarify this?

I agree that there are many aspects that we can improve on many sides and hopefully if we will be accepted in the incubation program, we will get more help with those docs, license and processes. 


We are looking forward to find out about the next steps and to receive more feedback!

Thanks,
Bogdan



------- Original Message -------

On Wednesday, March 16th, 2022 at 3:20 PM, Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:

> Bogdan Szabo contact at szabobogdan.com writes:
> 

> > Hi Greg,
> > 

> > As a quick response: our users are not that interested in self-hosting
> > 

> > GISCollective, that's why we focus the guide on how to use the
> > 

> > platform instead of how to set it up. We just started writing this
> > 

> > guide(it does not cover yet all the features) and we are looking
> > 

> > forward for feedback to improve it.
> 

> It's perfectly fine to have a user-facing guide. But you are ssking to
> 

> have an "open source project" accepted into osgeo, and thus IMHO there
> 

> needs to be a functioning open source project, which implies a place for
> 

> people that contribute to projects to understand the big picture and
> 

> particularly about building from source and contributing.
> 

> > If you are interested in how to set it up, you can check https://guide.giscollective.com/en/develop/installing/ page. It should have all the details you need. If there is something missing I would gladly add it.
> 

> That talks about getting docker images, which is not starting from
> 

> source code. I expect to see "clone this repo and follow BUILDING.md"
> 

> or similar (exact form not important of course), not "download this
> 

> binary system image". I am not saying it is bad to offer pre-built
> 

> binaries to people, but an open-source project (as distinct from a
> 

> hosted service offering for people that don't want an open source
> 

> project) has to have a source-first orientation.
> 

> > In terms of code, it's spread across multiple repos and on this page
> > 

> > https://guide.giscollective.com/en/develop/architecture/ you can check
> > 

> > out the architecture, and links to code of each component. Is there
> > 

> > anything that is missing to make it more clear for developers?
> 

> The architecture page is useful, sorry I missed it.
> 

> There is language I find strange:
> 

> We try to use open source programming languages and frameworks that
> 

> are supported by open source communities.
> 

> If this is an open source project, then the project sources being open
> 

> source is required, and it's all but required to be able to build/use
> 

> this using only open source tools. I therefore wonder what is behind
> 

> "try" and perhaps it is just an editing issue.
> 

> > I will try to address the rest of the questions by the end of the week.
> 

> Thanks for listening!
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