[Live-demo] Retirement and rejuvenation of past programs

[Cameron Shorter]

Thanks Hamish,

You have done some wonderful work getting projects onto OSGeo-Live, but 
I'm aware that you have less time than you've had before, and as such 
the currency of the projects on OSGeo-Live have suffered.

If you know of anyone else in each of the project communities worth 
reaching out to and asking if they can help, can you please share their 
details so one of us can contact them. (Alternatively you might have a 
personal connection with them and might want to reach out yourself).

Feel free to share publicly or privately.

Cheers, Cameron


On 25/4/17 9:38 am, Hamish B wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> to document some offline discussions here are some notes on some 
> packages which I've maintained in the past. (ah those halcyon days 
> when I had free moments to work on things properly...)
>
>
> GMT: In theory this should just be an apt-get install and minor tweak 
> to the $PATH in /etc/bash.bashrc or /etc/profile.d/.  The harder part 
> is providing a decent quickstart for a complicated-to-use package. 
> Package remains popular in the world of geophysics, open any AGU/EGU* 
> publication, Science magazine etc and you'll see lots of GMT-produced 
> maps.
>
> [*] Hi to anyone there
>
> MB Systems:  n.b. depends/built on GMT
>  - commit metrics may show few contributers but they are full time 
> funded programmers who act as the gatekeepers for community patches. 
> The mailing lists and userbase is quite active.
> As a meta thing I'd suggest to add some sort of mailing list/forum 
> activity to the metrics as an additional indicator of project health, 
> if possible. Quickstart doc could be parsed for the link?
>  - Sending some needed patches to the current DebianGIS package 
> maintainers is on my todo list. Alas build systems do not stand still.
>
> OpenCPN: fun, easy to use, vibrant community, arguably better than any 
> commercial offerings in the space, lots of plugins, ... but no 
> marketing budget beyond word of mouth between boaties. As long as the 
> packages are in good shape I'd vote to keep it going.
>
> ZyGrib: not nearly as refined as OpenCPN but fills its niche quite 
> well and puts weather forecasting in the hands of the people in a way 
> that (as far as I'm aware) no other software does. Used together with 
> a OpenCPN's GRIB overlay plugin there's a gorgeous gee-whiz demo 
> available. I'll have to prepare a screenshot to show that off.
>
> Sahana/Ushahidi: I really like having some blatant FOSS-for-good 
> software on the disc, but the communities really need to step up here 
> to maintain them. The "geo" tie may not be as "hard-geo" as geo-format 
> processing tools, but at least the main work-canvas is a map and it 
> passes any geo-as-global (e.g. national geographic/bbc world) test.
>
> OSM: if metrics show Merkaartor/osmosis are withering on the vine, so 
> be it.  Note some of the tools are part of the OSM data city-extract 
> production tool-chain so not much extra work to keep them around. I 
> assume some small background tools can be left on the disc even if a 
> quickstart/summary doesn't make the cut?
>
> R: is it "geo" enough to justify inclusion/megabytes used? (same 
> question for Octave [does the m_map toolbox for Matlab work with 
> Octave? FOSS-enough license?])
>
> Viking: I haven't been paying attention to how active it is. If new 
> versions are coming in from ubuntu and the install is little more than 
> apt-get install I'd say keep it, otherwise if it is stalled for years 
> and little interest I'd say dump it.
>
>
> As a general thing, if projects want to stay they can send someone to 
> help.
>
>
> I'd suggest to leave GMT/MB Sys/OpenCPN/ZyGrib in my hands, and if 
> updates are not in place by 15 May put non-working things onto the 
> hibernation track as needed.
>
>
> best regards from deep in the south pacific,
> Hamish
>
>
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-- 
Cameron Shorter
M +61 419 142 254

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