[Live-demo] Rethinking osgeo-live

[Angelos Tzotsos]

And something I forgot to write down:

What about security updates? We would need to maintain libraries like 
Qt, while this is done upstream right now.

Best,
Angelos

On 10/25/2012 11:16 AM, Angelos Tzotsos wrote:
> Hi Barry,
>
> On 10/25/2012 10:29 AM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
>> On 25 October 2012 03:33, Brian Hamlin <maplabs at light42.com> wrote:
>>> this is breathtakingly unrealistic :-)
>>   Thanks! :)
>>
>>   I'll approach some of the criticisms...
>>
>>   * Alex, yes, correctly compiling Windows things is hard. But someone
>> has done it for OSGeo4W, Jo has done it for Portable GIS. That
>> expertise exists.
>>
>>   * Alex, Angelos: this wouldn't be statically linked binaries
>> (HUUUUGE!) but more like a python virtual env. There would be some
>> wrapper to make sure qgis always links with /osgeo/lib/libqt4.so, and
>> never with /usr/lib/libqt4.so. Essentially it would be everything that
>> is currently on the live disc (except the kernel and user tools), with
>> the applications configured to get their dependencies from the right
>> place.
> I see what you mean, I am not sure it is wise to bypass distributions. 
> How many software providers do this today?
> Even Google with all those resources available has not been able to 
> provide one binary for all Linux machines...
>
> We would need to re-invent the wheel in some cases to do this.
> But this does not mean I don't like the way you are thinking.
>>
>>   * Angelos: I demand (and get) freedom for my desktop, at the cost of
>> not having central IT back my machine up. However, if I take a live
>> DVD to a Windows-using, central-IT supported colleagues desk and go
>> 'hey, look at this', all I get is frustration and eventually a BIOS
>> password prompt. So I then have to go back with OSGeo4W.
> Unfortunately freedom is still an every-day battle.
> At least we are winning on the server side.
>>
>>   * Angelos: running in your favourite OS should be as simple as
>> copying the things you want to run to your currently existing and
>> configured-exactly-how-you-like-it OS.
> I know packaging is not perfect today, but is much better than it used 
> to be 5 or 10 years back.
>> I don't see the point in making
>> an openSUSE version - we're trying to promote OSGeo s/w here, not
>> GNU/Linux distributions.
> This is exactly why this version is not available...
>>
>>   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?
> Because GNU/Linux is all about freedom of choice. No matter how we 
> decide to create packages, people will want native packages for their 
> distribution through UbuntuGIS, DebianGIS, EL, OBS, AUR etc.
>
> I agree that OSGeo4W is a huge project that fits exactly the needs of 
> Windows users. I am sure a OSGeo4Mac would also be very successive.
>>
>>   I don't see a technical barrier to this, so it's just limited by
>> resources (our time!). Anyone got a spare 20 years?
> If we had the spare time and I was to make this decision, I would 
> prefer offering deb and rpm files for all OSGeo related  projects and 
> I would be left with 10 years for vacations :)
>>
>> Barry
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>>
> Cheers,
> Angelos
>


-- 
Angelos Tzotsos
Remote Sensing Laboratory
National Technical University of Athens
http://users.ntua.gr/tzotsos