[Live-demo] Retire MapTiler from OSGeo-Live

[Activity Workshop]

Hi,

I've had a quick look at the MapTiler source, and I agree with those who
think it should be _kept_ in osgeo if at all possible.  It seems to work
fine, it looks good, seems very useful and is one of those things that's
easy to demo too so it fits extremely well.  All credit to Petr and the
other authors, thank you for this nice piece of work!

I'd be glad to help with the necessary "adjustments" to the code if I
can, and if help is needed.  From the spreadsheet it looks to be
unaltered for several versions of osgeo so I assume that it has been
thoroughly tested and it works.  So the effort to maintain it working
but without the MapTiler references should be very manageable.  It's
just a shame that the request was received (and already acted upon) so
suddenly before the release, it would have been better to have more time
for preparation.

What I think we need now is a stable base of the source code and a way
to build a package suitable for osgeo.  Unfortunately it seems that the
code on github (I found two versions, both identical) is _not_ the same
as the one on the osgeo DVD.  Github (and googlecode) have 1.0alpha3 and
osgeo has 1.0beta2, and despite the innocuous-sounding version numbers
there are huge differences between them.  I assume we want to go forward
starting from the osgeo code, unless someone has a more complete source
package somewhere?  Could this be put up on somewhere like github too?

About the differences between the gdal2tiles.py files provided by gdal
and maptiler, that sounds like a complex issue but maybe that doesn't
have to be resolved immediately - this conflict has been around for a while.

About the MapTiler icon, personally I can't see any reason why we can't
continue to use it, at least in the short term.  The image is
BSD-licensed and is already "out there", so we should have no problems
using and redistributing it.  Maybe the icon can be changed later, but
the priority now should be to get the software available again.

And about the name "IceTiler" - is this open for discussion?  I
understand the tip of the hat to Iceweasel, but maybe a more descriptive
name would be more appropriate here - something to give a clue what the
software does (like the name MapTiler does).  It doesn't tile ices. 
Might I suggest some alternative names, like "MapSlicer" or "TileGenie"
instead?  Actually it looks like those names have gone already, but
something else in that direction maybe?

Regards,
activityworkshop