[osgeo4w-dev] Questions

[Ari Jolma]

Not much traffic so far on this list. Maybe I'll post a few questions:

- What's the current idea of a product? A big bundle of everything or a 
kind of meta installer, which goes through a series of questions with 
the user and then goes out to internet to download and install the 
requested packages?

- I'm not very knowledgeable about executables in Windows but I know for 
example that I can't mix Activestate Perl (compiled with VC I believe) 
with Perl modules that are compiled with (or in?) MinGW. However, I can 
use for example binary distributions of PostGIS DLLs with GDAL that I've 
compiled with MSYS. (I'm not sure what I'm asking here, except that I'd 
be happy to be able to rely on an existing gdal.dll for example)

- Are we aiming at / supporting users, developers, or hackers? At least 
the Geoinformatica stack is a bit different for each of these (users 
need only the GUI app, developers want to write Perl programs, hackers 
want to install new pure-Perl modules, über-hackers want to compile, 
install and link in new things).

- When will the questions on the wiki page be answered? I mean is 
somebody going to write a policy document for example?

- I've taken the policy that I don't really install the software in 
Windows, I write a start-up script (using bash as dos batch files suck), 
which sets up the paths and environment variables etc. Many FOSS seem to 
work that way and it's a good thing because I don't need to bother our 
university's Windows-admins to install software. This however does not 
work for software like PostgreSQL which needs to be installed as a service.

Just some Friday night thoughts,

Ari