[Live-demo] More ideas on collaborative development

[Massimo Di Stefano]

Hi Cameron,

> Massimo,
> I'm interested to hear your feedback on this email.
> In particular, I'm keen to determine whether the ideas proposed fit  
> with what you are doing, and whether we can collaborate to some level.


Little update on what i'm doing :

Actually i'm hard-working on a sidux live.iso produced by a virtualbox  
VM,
doing regular update && dist-upgrade.
The sidux distro use debian-sid, sidux (including debian-gis repository)
It use the latest kernel and updated packages (i added the non-free  
repository too)


For some reason i prefer to build some sw from svn source code : Gdal,  
Grass, OpenScenaGraph, Ossim, Qgis, Mapserver, Mapnik, Libtiff,  
Libgeotiff, GpsTK).
and other sw from tarball (pgadmin3 and some others)

"""  about svn sw against stable version ... :
i prefer to have development (svn) version, in this way i can do an  
intense testing process using it
in my short experience i find more bugs in the stable version rather  
than the svn version (this can  be not true for you .. i agree, but  
this is my experience)
.
  If we have time to give a look, every day, in the svn boot logs ...   
for each application we are intersted for, in this way we know if  
there is a commit that represent an  update or a bug fix changes.
knowing the svn progress we can test the new enanchments and debug it  
if/where it is possible.
in this way the sw development go ahead more fast (if we provide logs,  
ticket or feedback .. using m-list and irc) and if (unlucky) a bug  
come up and no solution/fix is ready we can even do svn -r "release- 
without the critical bug" to checkout a good revision tagged as "svn- 
stable"  """

(odd : using a source build for gdal i need to build from source all  
the sw that depends on it, but it ensures me to have a working gdal  
version without generate conflict bettween variouse tools that uses  
gdal (see gdal-grass and ossim-gdal plug-in).


What i'm including in the .iso :

- sw we have in the last osgeo dvd (need to add java apps yet, using  
the free jdm and not the sun jvm)
  (i agree that we need a full detailed list about the software We  
want install on the live disc)
- ossim+3d stuff
- updated grass6.5 and qgis1.2  svn version (plus all the qgis-python  
plug-in and some grass addons)
- other scientific sw like octave (+qt interface) and variouse  
plotting tools
- R with spatial packages already installed
- gmt + mbsystem
- some FEM (finite elements) sw
- database managment sw (pgadmin3, phppgadmin)
- openoffice 3 complete suite, gimp, inkskape
- latex tools
- development kit + dev packages headers (compilers and tools like  
gcc, jam, ant, scons, etc... and the needed -dev dependencies to build  
sw from source)
- sidux help file in all avaiable language.

i need to add  yet the java sw (geoserver, geonetwork, udig+javagrass,  
josm ... others?)
here i need help and i'll give a depth look at the future scripts to  
configure them.

i'm planning to add also OMAR (ossim mapping archive),  OTB (Orfeo  
Toolbox) and tilecache + GeoDjango


I'm installing sw from source instead of use what the debian- 
repository already has beacouse :

- installing sw from svn or source tar.gz  give us a distro that is  
really up-to-date, and it is aslo "upgradable"
  every time the user needs an upgrade, beacouse it already has all  
the needed dependencies (-dev
  packages) and i'll provide scripts to update configure and make the  
sw installed from source.

- there are some packages (sdl, libtiff, pyqwt, pgadmin3, ... others)  
with some problems and bugs
  so installing from source i can avoid to have bugus sw installed

I choose sidux instead of debian stable or ubuntu beacouse :

-  it has more updated packages and it is a stabilized sidux distro

-  using sidux it already install in the .iso some virtualizzation  
tools that give us :
   in a VirtualBox Machine, just select the sidux.iso in virtualbox as  
bootable device and the VM will have
   expanding desktop and 3d environment ready to use in the VM   (ose  
version)

(the downloaded iso is about 450 mb, it is really thin)
starting from it id done a apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade (adding  
the non-free repository too)
i added script to rebuild the SW installed from source. the final .iso  
size is near 2.3 gb


>
> I'm hoping that the install scripts that we write for each project  
> which target Xubuntu will be useful for your sidux development, and  
> that you will be in a position to write some of the install scripts,  
> and or test what we have written.
>

For sure, i can test the scripts without problems and adapt it to  
works on sidux.
I need help for the java apps beacouse i never used it too much i'm  
able to install Geonetwork and Geoserver (based on tomcat)...  but i  
never configured it to works on data (step needed to have a working  
geoserver/geonetwork demo).

For openlayer+Tilecache+Mapnik+ Osm(including tools like osm2pgsql and  
mapnik rendering)) i can ask on the relative #irc channels to find  
help to configure a good example-project.


My idea is to provide to the user not only sw, but an easy way to try  
it out too.
Provide too much data for test all the sw installed is not a good  
thing so i decided to use
as demo-examples data the same demostration files for variouse sw  
(where applicable).

(thanks to the gdal-grass-plug-in and the ossim-gdal-plug-in we can  
use the same dataset for variouse project, without data duplications  
and without needs to download data after the iso is running)

So simply, i'm using for  Mapserver (i use kamap as frontend for ms),  
Qgis, Grass, Ossim the same demostration files  based on a Grass  
location (unzipped spearfish is only 60mb).

But i should like  to have also :

- a global-dataset for all the .iso users  (world coastlines and  
countries boundaries, lake, stream) and a world.jpg lightweight raster  
image.
- a localized dataset + localized tutorial (downloadable from osgeo)


Right now i'm installing some sw on the VM and debugging it to see if  
all works as aspected
i'm avaiable to provide any kind of test and feedback.
if yoy know a good place where to upload a testing.iso image i can  
provide you a test-alfa release at the end of this week.

apologize me for the not perfect english, i hope i gived you a good  
and not confuse explanation
about what i'm doing.

let me know what can i do to help us to work on the foss4g live dvd  
project.


p.s..:
unlucky we are on different distro (this don't help) but i will not  
use ubuntu beacouse it gived me some problems in the past, tring to  
use ossim+3d stuff beacouse it doesn't have an up-to-date kernel that  
can runs well on my laptop-hardware (this the reason i switched to  
sidux, i was an ex happy-ubuntu user)


Ciao,

Massimo.