[Live-demo] Request for inclusion in OSGeo Live

[Ian Edwards]

 Thank you all for the comments (and for the offers of support)


The issues that Cameron raises are very important, and as a user of OSGeo
Live I personally agree that each of these points should be carefully
considered.


 1. Is the project too specialised for the vast majority of people who pick
up OSGeo-Live?

 Iris is powerful and specialised but it also has benefits for the whole
range of OSGeo Live users. Our workshop at FOSS4G 2013 is aimed at both
experienced developers and at complete beginners (e.g. users who are new to
python) http://2013.foss4g.org/provisional/workshops#W15. In the workshop
we will demonstrate how the underlying plotting library (based on python's
matplotlib) can be used for batch processing of multiple cartographic plots
for any use case.

 As a comparison: WCS is perceived as complex and specialist compared to
WMS. Libraries such as Iris have a very important role to play for handling
multidimensional data (including detailed meta data within the file) from
many sources and fit well with both OGC standards and other OSGeo packages.


 2. Is it seriously used outside of UK Met Office?

Massimo has given one independent example of Iris being in use
internationally, his message to the list also shares our excitement about
integration into the OSGeo stack (we have use cases for ncWMS, GeoServer,
PyCSW and ZOO-Project and it's likely that either we, or the community,
will develop a QGIS plugin to provide an easier interface to the library).
The development of the software (and the LGPL licence) was specifically to
enable use outside of the Met Office and to promote easy collaboration
among users.


 3. We need to be careful that we don't include every project looking for a
community

I agree with this statement the most. In this case we're not looking for a
community/home – we're interested in integrating with the rest of the open
source stack that we belong to, and in supporting the community to work
effectively with emerging technologies like WCS 2.0 and NetCDF.


 4. Maybe IRIS would be a better candidate to join OSGeo-Live in a future
release?

The case will certainly be stronger when we can demonstrate many examples
of Iris integrating into the full software stack. Our reason for applying
now is because a) integration work is already well under way, but it will
be easier (for the rest of the community) by making the library easily
available alongside the rest of the stack, b) we want to ensure the
software is available alongside GeoServer and QGIS for our FOSS4G workshop
– we could make our own live DVD... but it would be based on OSGeo Live and
we'd loose the benefit of having the library available to other conference
attendees who are interested in the presentations and also the wider OSGeo
community.







On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 9:17 AM, Hamish <hamish_b at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Cameron wrote:
> > Maybe IRIS would be a better
> > candidate to join OSGeo-Live in a future release?
>
> IRIS 1.3 needed 3.3mb of disk space. I assume 1.4.0 is not too
> dissimilar, and that the support and demo files don't alter that
> requirement drastically.
>
> We just managed to free up 150-200mb disk space (shared libs for
> MB-System amongst others), and I will sponsor and take care of
> adding an install_iris.sh script on the disc for the Nottingham
> workshop if one is provided to me.
>
> you guys can figure out if you want an overview page for it or not
> linked on the front page list of projects, but it's a bit of a
> no-brainer to me to install the software and a quickstart (linked
> or not) in the background regardless.
>
>
> regards,
> Hamish
>
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