[OSGeo-Discuss] Distribution Special Interest Groups

[Silke Reimer]

On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 10:41:54AM -0300, pmarc wrote:
> 2006/3/8, Silke Reimer <Silke.Reimer at intevation.de>:
> 
> > > like Debian-GIS.
> > > People there are working hard to get updated packages under Debian
> > > Repositories.
> >
> > The main problem is not to get the packages unter a Debian
> > Repository but to fed them into official Debian distribution. BTW:
> 
> I was refering to the official Debian repos (i.e. the distribution)
> 
> > This should be done for distributions like Fedora as well in my
> > opinion. If every FC packager announces his packages on Fedora
> > Extra other packagers could do their work based on them instead of
> > beginning from scratch.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > > I do not know how these things work in the real world, but maybe
> > > converting existing .deb packages to rpm with alien should do...
> 
> > Unfortunately your suggestion is not feasible. It is even worse: You
> > have to build RPMS for each RPM-based distribution: Fedora, SuSE,
> > Mandrive etc.  The reason lies in the management of package
> > dependencies. The libraries that are necessary to build and run a
> > package are named differently in each distribution. Also the
> > versions that are available differ between the distributions.
> 
> Maybe OSGeo should stick to the proven method of distributing tarballs
> and then link to the "associate" distros.
> Or else, I think I didn't get what is meant by this OSGeo Distribution
> project...

I think it is meant as a project that helps people to coordinate
forces to build packages for different distributions.  Such a group
already exists as Debian subproject but is not existent yet for
Fedora Extras or other distributions. This often leads to duplicated
effort since a packager doesn't know the other packagers.
Furthermore it is difficult to decide which package is good to start
from. 

If you have one official place where you can ask for help with
GIS specific packages and where available packages are listed in a
good way this could help a lot. 

Furthermore right now there isn't any infrastructure to work on one
package with a group of packagers.  In debian GIS there has been set
up a CVS repository to coordinate this task. Something similar for
Fedora, SuSE etc. could be very helpful.

> 
> Could someone please elaborate/provide links on that?

What I wrote above is a very rough outline of such a project. As an
example you might look at the debian GIS project [1] which has set
up an infrastructure like the one I proposed. We can't use those
ressources though because they have been set up for the whole debian
project and not for other distributions.

Many greetings,

    Silke

[1] http://pkg-grass.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl

-- 
Silke Reimer   : www.intevation.de/~silke | GISpatcher: www.gispatcher.de
Intevation GmbH: www.intevation.de        | Thuban    : thuban.intevation.org
Georgstr.4     : 49074 Osnabrück          | FreeGIS   : www.freegis.org
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