[Live-demo] OSGeo Production Server

[Johan Van de Wauw]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 10:44 PM, Cameron Shorter
<cameron.shorter at gmail.com> wrote:
> I suggest you try migrating one application to a .deb file, and see how
> feasible it is, then we can work out a strategy for the rest of the
> applications.
>
> I suspect that the migration to ubuntu/debian will be a long term thing,
> which will take a year or two before we finish. As an interim measure, we
> could create a "Production Server" version using the same build scripts we
> use for OSGeo-Live.

I think it would be a nice idea to create some kind of osgeo
repository at some point. Having packages of osgeo products which can
easily be installed and uninstalled would be very nice. On the other
hand creating packages for some packages may prove to be very
difficult if we want to keep up with all debian packaging guidelines
(a *lot* of java libraries will have to be packed, which may/may not
have an upstream with sensible source releases. Apart from that,
license problems may keep out many packages (all (almost all?) java
packages use JAI, which is non-free software, incompatible with the
GPL-license of many of the java packages). A similar (but less
problematic) situation for mapguide, which relies on openssl (which is
open source, but in principle not compatible with GPL).

If osgeo provides a repository which is perhaps a little less strict
in its packaging guidelines, eg allowing java packages with their
libraries not built from source, less strict licensing guidelines,
allow installation under /opt these packages may still be provided
(hopefully an intermediate staging step until they can be provided in
debian).

Anyway, before releasing any server packages of osgeo projects I think
we should think about how security updates can be provided for the
packages we provide. If these are simple (applying a patch and
recompiling, replace a jar with a new version) this is possible. If
the upstream project does not release fixes (or only in versions which
are incompatible with the current release) it is impossible to support
them (and it would be unwise to use it anyway).

If we have a repository, I doubt whether having a seperate server dvd
is so useful. I guess most server admins will choose one
project/platform to base their application on. I don't see the why we
should have an installation which provides eg geoserver and mapguide
and mapserver (etc).