[Live-demo] Rethinking osgeo-live

[Alex Mandel]

On 10/25/2012 12:29 AM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> 
>  I'm just thinking that there's more worth in concentrating efforts in
> getting OSGeo applications out there rather than spinning up new
> Ubuntu distributions every six months. To that end, a simple,
> user-driven binary installation process would seem to be optimal. We
> have OSGeo4W, why not OSGeo4L and OSGeo4M?

We have those, slightly less formally:
UbuntuGIS/DebianGIS (I'm also on that team)
Kyngchaos

Yes, the foundation agrees that more effort into the above and OSGeo4w
is worthwhile. Those methods of distribution are doing quite well and
the more stable/official they become the more likely IT managers will
use them to do installs.

I gave up a long time ago on pushing for OSGeo Portable Apps (though it
can be useful) and just take my laptop everywhere. As more of the world
moves to their primary machine being a laptop, tablet or something not a
desktop I think the grip of central IT is less of a concern.

We switch base distro once a year (specifically to make it less work),
the every 6 months thing is to get updates of the Geospatial packages
out there (ie Postgis 2 missed 6.0 but will make it onto 6.5 and people
can't wait to try it) and to get updated docs in new languages out
there. I have high hopes the Korean docs will be above 50% next release,
up from about 6 pages currently.

I see it as
OSGeo live -> OSGeo4w
           -> Kyngchaos
           -> Ubuntu/Debian/OpenSuse/etc

Since OSGeo4w has apt under it, if you're talking basically a package
manager for OSGeo that's univeral but pulls the relevant packages on
whatever system your own. That would be nifty, and I did hallway chat
about that with some people at Foss4g. I consider this a separate use
case, not unworthy, just separate.

Thanks,
Alex