[Live-demo] Rethinking osgeo-live

[Barry Rowlingson]

On 25 October 2012 03:33, Brian Hamlin <maplabs at light42.com> wrote:
> this is breathtakingly unrealistic :-)

 Thanks! :)

 I'll approach some of the criticisms...

 * Alex, yes, correctly compiling Windows things is hard. But someone
has done it for OSGeo4W, Jo has done it for Portable GIS. That
expertise exists.

 * Alex, Angelos: this wouldn't be statically linked binaries
(HUUUUGE!) but more like a python virtual env. There would be some
wrapper to make sure qgis always links with /osgeo/lib/libqt4.so, and
never with /usr/lib/libqt4.so. Essentially it would be everything that
is currently on the live disc (except the kernel and user tools), with
the applications configured to get their dependencies from the right
place.

 * Angelos: I demand (and get) freedom for my desktop, at the cost of
not having central IT back my machine up. However, if I take a live
DVD to a Windows-using, central-IT supported colleagues desk and go
'hey, look at this', all I get is frustration and eventually a BIOS
password prompt. So I then have to go back with OSGeo4W.

 * Angelos: running in your favourite OS should be as simple as
copying the things you want to run to your currently existing and
configured-exactly-how-you-like-it OS. I don't see the point in making
an openSUSE version - we're trying to promote OSGeo s/w here, not
GNU/Linux distributions.

 I'm just thinking that there's more worth in concentrating efforts in
getting OSGeo applications out there rather than spinning up new
Ubuntu distributions every six months. To that end, a simple,
user-driven binary installation process would seem to be optimal. We
have OSGeo4W, why not OSGeo4L and OSGeo4M?

 I don't see a technical barrier to this, so it's just limited by
resources (our time!). Anyone got a spare 20 years?

Barry