[osgeo4w-dev] Steps Forward for OSGeo4W

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Paolo,

On Thu, 11. Apr 2013 at 06:22:02 +0200, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> Thanks to all. I think it is important knowing also the opinion of
> Juergen, since he is heavily involved in the packaging of some of the
> most crucial pieces for us.

I'm more doin' and not the talking type  - because when with all the talking
there's no time left for the doing.  ;)

I asked for the particular problem you were getting complaints about.  That can
probably be solved, if it's a technical one.   All other problems are not that
easy to fix - at least not for me.

My point of using OSGeo4W was to distribute QGIS and get the dependencies in a
uptodate fashion almost for free.

Unfortunately the second part didn't work well.  Most OSGeo4w projects
apparently don't recognize OSGeo4W as an easy way to distribute windows
binaries and therefore either roll their own packages or ignore Windows
completely (and let others produce binaries).

GRASS and QGIS use OSGeo4W for nightly builds and also put out stable packages
when releases occur (standalone installers are made from the same binaries; for
QGIS, I that's true for GRASS, too).  Most of the other packages (correcty me
if I'm wrong) don't get that kind of attention and are behind - some even made
once and were never touched again.

Some packages that were only added because something else needed are also
unmaintained and unless there is requirement (read: someone complains) to
update them for some dependant, they are also left behind (python extensions,
apache).

I wonder how we could get (and keep) more maintainers - or the projects
themselves - pulled into osgeo4w.  Because now it sometimes takes begging,
poking, waiting and in the end you sometimes eventually do it (almost) yourself
(like the python 2.7 transition) - maybe leaving optional stuff behind - also
if that users complain ((proprietary) GDAL extensions, python-rpy).

Having a VM with all the sources and recipes on a single machine from a vcs
sounds like an option to make everything easier to maintain - not sure how that
would scale - if we really got more maintainers.  And that means we're going to
put work to reproduce what we have instead of moving forward - not that's a bad
thing, but maybe noteworthy.

And before I'm postponing this again (and again), I'm sending it out this
time... ;)


Jürgen 

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