[Live-demo] new packages

[Hamish]

Cameron wrote:
> How stable are these packages?

The best I can provide is a subjective answer- different people
and projects will have totally different thresholds and ideas of
what that actually means. I spend most of my time with Debian
and GRASS, both of which are extrememly conservative with what
they call "stable", so that's my bias. (Debian's "unstable" is
probably more mature than most other distros stable releases,
so I'm not really sure how to compare ...)


I'll try though:
-Will they work without crashing? Yes.
-GMT: very mature and well established for years.
-Octave: mature and well established for years.
-Octave mapping toolbox: I've little experience with it but it's
an official debian/ubuntu package fwtw.
-OpenCPN: a bit of a newcomer compared to the others but largely
put together from established mature libraries (gdal+libS52+...),
by an active dev team. At version "1.3.6" with packaged versions
available for Mac,Win,and Ubuntu, for whatever that means.
-OSM tools: I've little experience with them myself, but as they
are standed packages used by hundreds of OSMers all over the
world I assume they are pretty mature.


So I'd say that all are well in the "stable" category and have
reached the point of critical mass, but within that you can
probably open any geophysical journal from the last 10 years and
find a plot made with GMT, while at the other end of the
spectrum OpenCPN only began around 5-6 years ago and has only
applied to be an official debian/ubuntu package in the last 6
months.


Hamish