[Live-demo] Next Version - Spring 2010

[Hamish]

Cameron wrote:
> * I think we need to consolidate our web pages and brand
> them consistently. We have web pages under "livedvd, gisvm,
> arramagong, ..."
> I think that our project name and mission should not be
> tied to the distribution medium, because we can be much more
> than that. What we have is a "build process for OSGeo
> software  (and documentation)". Currently the build
> process is tied to Ubuntu, but in the future we will likely
> have spin offs to other platforms. Eg, we might put out a
> documentation or tutorial release which is available on
> windows.

While I agree that de-messing is good I respectfully disagree that all
of what we do should fall under one name, and that the name should be
arramagong. 

as far as the VM and DVD (+ future usb) being children on the same
arramagong (grand)parent, that seems logical enough to me. but they
are not quite siblings either... the DVD is an output, the GISVM is the
method. and the main Live* mailing list, wiki page, tracker etc are for
use by all osgeo-live projects, not just arramagong (nothing saying that
the first link on the page, in bold letters and blinking can't be arr.
though...)

My point it that the greater live-demo* project is a number of things & we
shouldn't force it onto a single track. It just so happens that arramagong
is the leader right now. (largely due to the fact that it is the only one
with any formal support, which is a good thing and I certainly don't mind
encouraging that!)  At this point I find it hard to justify having that
branding move beyond the conference distro though.


[*] "live-demo" borrowing from the mailing list name, which is not quite
right either as we can do more than just demos.. perhaps live-osgeo is a
better catch-all name?


fwiw the DebianGIS mailing list's email is grass-pkg at ...debian.org due
to similar historical reasons & unexpected growth, as the livedvd/ dir
in our SVN. No one seems to mind as far as I know and it doesn't seem to
hurt adoption by non-grass users. If you're already there you know what
it's about, it's just internals.


I hope that we can work on the USB-stick version, and that what we learn
from adding yet-another medium might provide enough perspective to the
overall hierarchy to sort this all out.


> * I'm hopeful that at least one of the projects we have
> packaged in the liveDVD can be moved into
> DebianGIS/UbuntuGIS projects. So that the LiveDVD project
> can be used as a stepping stone toward getting a project
> into 

fwiw, lessons learnt have already helped with official packaging, even if
they are not high profile. The road to becoming an official package is
long and "getting it to work" is just one small (but rather important)
step.


Ossim is actively going for it, I hope having them with us can help them
to succeed.  (I looked over the new install script, good job!)


> Ubuntu. Ideally, we will document and automate this
> process as we go. While the arramagong project has been good
> for attracting uses, we would attract significantly more
> users if trying osgeo software was as easy as "apt-get
> install arramagong".

Just to let you know, if that is intended to set up desktop backgrounds
& icons it would be very unlikely to ever become an official debian
package. It is impressively strict. I've no idea about Ubuntu policies,
just that they are looser.

the arramagong collection of help pages & graphics could be put into
a doc dir, with a so named script to load the main page in the webbrowser
or something I guess..... ??

we could put out something like a "live-osgeo" package which just pulled
in packages we like, but DebianGIS and debianEdu-geo already have those
packages, so we'd just be making a third duplicate...



2c ramble,
Hamish