[Live-demo] Rethinking osgeo-live

[Angelos Tzotsos]

Hi Barry,

On 10/25/2012 10:29 AM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> 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.
I see what you mean, I am not sure it is wise to bypass distributions. 
How many software providers do this today?
Even Google with all those resources available has not been able to 
provide one binary for all Linux machines...

We would need to re-invent the wheel in some cases to do this.
But this does not mean I don't like the way you are thinking.
>
>   * 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.
Unfortunately freedom is still an every-day battle.
At least we are winning on the server side.
>
>   * 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 know packaging is not perfect today, but is much better than it used 
to be 5 or 10 years back.
> I don't see the point in making
> an openSUSE version - we're trying to promote OSGeo s/w here, not
> GNU/Linux distributions.
This is exactly why this version is not available...
>
>   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?
Because GNU/Linux is all about freedom of choice. No matter how we 
decide to create packages, people will want native packages for their 
distribution through UbuntuGIS, DebianGIS, EL, OBS, AUR etc.

I agree that OSGeo4W is a huge project that fits exactly the needs of 
Windows users. I am sure a OSGeo4Mac would also be very successive.
>
>   I don't see a technical barrier to this, so it's just limited by
> resources (our time!). Anyone got a spare 20 years?
If we had the spare time and I was to make this decision, I would prefer 
offering deb and rpm files for all OSGeo related  projects and I would 
be left with 10 years for vacations :)
>
> Barry
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>
Cheers,
Angelos

-- 
Angelos Tzotsos
Remote Sensing Laboratory
National Technical University of Athens
http://users.ntua.gr/tzotsos