[osgeo4w-dev] Steps Forward for OSGeo4W

[Paolo Cavallini]

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Il 11/04/2013 11:08, Jürgen E. Fischer ha scritto:

> 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).

Yes, I think we have a governance problem here, and OSGeo as an
organization should be more involved in it.

> 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.

Yes, that's probably the biggest issue from the user point of view.

> 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.

Yes, we're basically talking about redoing a deb-like distro on
Windows. Not an easy task for sure, so cooperation and proper support
will be essential.
Again, this boils down to a governance problem, and OSGeo perceiving
osgeo4w as a crucial tool for dissemination of free GIS (far more than
promotion material IMHO).

All the best.
- -- 
Paolo Cavallini - Faunalia
www.faunalia.eu
Full contact details at www.faunalia.eu/pc
Nuovi corsi QGIS e PostGIS: http://www.faunalia.it/calendario
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