[postgis-users] Roadmap for next major release of PostGIS

[Attila Csipa]

On Thursday 29 May 2008 03.38:32 Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
> This is pretty standard behavior for all distribution. Their goal is a
> stable release across a large number of packages that they can maintain
> for a long while. Sysadmins and IT folks are more concerned with broad

Ubuntu was the exception to this, as the cornerstone of it's philosophy was 
the 6 months release cycle with bleeding edge versions, no waiting for Debian 
and/or fully mature packages. That's why it was sort of paradoxal that when 
Ubuntu 8.04 came out, Debian Lenny already had the next generation (gdal 1.5, 
mapserver 5.1, mapnik 0.5) in it's repository for months. Ubuntu used to be a 
mix of what you have in Debian testing/unstable, but nowadays can't (or 
won't) keep up the pace and fell back to somewhere between Debian 
stable/testing. If Lenny comes out as scheduled (September) it will be the 
first time that even Debian stable has newer packages than Ubuntu.

> In most cases, the production environment does not have compliers and
> dev libs and headers and such installed. So you have to have a build box
> with all that stuff. In Debian I have backported some packages in the
> past, but then Debian changed the packaging tools, which made it really
> difficult to do the backports at that time. I haven't tried on a more
> recent versions in a while.

pbuilder is the answer to your problems, at least if you live in the .deb 
world. You don't need a build box and it won't pollute (apart for itself and 
a handful of support packages) your production system, and you can 
effortlessly build even accross different versions of distributions if you 
have a diverse server farm with different versions/distributions.