[Live-demo] More ideas on collaborative development

[Cameron Shorter]

I've been thinking hard about recent comments from Hamish, Massimo, 
Richardo and Stefan in relation to collaborative development of GISVM 
and LiveDVD. I've also been looking over the wiki pages and svn scripts 
and the GISVM to see what has been done already. After sleeping on this 
for a few nights, I wonder what people think about the following ideas:

1. Write install scripts for each application, and put these scripts 
into subversion:

I suggest we create bash install scripts for each application we want on 
the LiveDVD. These scripts will contain all the steps necessary to 
install a project. Ie, we would have one script for geoserver, one for 
mapserver, one for qgis, etc.

I notice that Massimo is part way here, having written the installation 
steps into the wiki at:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GFOSS.it_Live_DVD_Install

Stefan has created a similar wiki at:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/LISAsoft-LiveCD_process
Stefan has also been collecting these steps into scripts stored in 
subversion:
https://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/livedvd/scripts/trunk/LiveDVDFromScratch/

The key points here is:
* Community engagement: It would be straight forward for projects to 
write their own installation scripts. They can write them, then copy 
into svn, then let one of the VM team members apply to the latest 
virtual machine.
* The scripts will be kept under version control. (Following on from a 
comment from Hamish about the value of svn)
* If a .deb file exists for a project, all the better. The install 
script will just be one line long.
* These scripts could be integrated into a greater build script as we 
progress.
* I expect these bash scripts would eventually become the basis of a 
.deb file?

2. Xubuntu:
I suggest that we use Xubuntu as a basis for the GISVM instead of 
Ubuntu, as it is specifically designed to run on a low powered 
environment, but still runs all the Ubuntu packages.

3. Wiki pages:
There are a few too many LiveDVD wiki pages, which makes it hard for a 
newbie to find out what is current, and what is not.
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:Live-demo
I suggest that we consolidate down to a few pages, removing content from 
some pages and just providing a pointer to more recent pages.

4. Central VM, which we rsync from:
As mentioned earlier, I think that we should set up a central virtual 
machine, probably on OSGeo hardware, which we can all rsync from in 
order to collaboratively update the same virtual machine.

I'm interested to hear feedback on this, and I'd like to help out on 
some of these tasks, if they are considered worth following.

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com