[Qgis-developer] Announce: TauDEM plugin for QGIS

[Mikhail Titov]

Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> writes:

>>> It has a number of strange dependencies, though
> ...
> do you have on your machine the packages I mentioned?

I have all but amd and linux kernel 3.2 related. So I guess these are Ubuntu
specific and picked up by ppa building system.

>> Meanwhile I'd suggest to rebuild package from the source one using apt-src
>> [2] or something [3]. I'll see later what might be wrong.
>
> have you contacted debian-gis for the possible inclusion of the
> package upstream?

Not yet for a couple of reasons.

* I'm not quite certain how we handle different versions of TauDEM.

Shall each version package provide taudem and conflict with each other
or shall alternatives be used and allow installation of all versions at
once with version specific postfixes (e.g., /usr/bin/pitremove.506 and
/usr/bin/pitremove.52)? 

While alternatives provide a mechanism for keeping one main selection
via symbolic links, I'm not sure how to make use of different versions
from sextante plugin. Perhaps Alexander has some idea. It would be a
pain to name a path to each individual tool.  If postfixes are used,
then we have a trouble on Windows as mass-rename is needed. I guess the
use of alternatives with symlinks pointing to /usr/lib/taudem-5.2/ and
/usr/lib/taudem-5.0.6/ or alike would be the best as it would allow to
choose a path and this implementation would fit well on Windows.

I may be wrong but there seems to be no algorithmic difference between
those versions while batch processing is already implemented in sextante.
It would be just unnecessary steps to set up individual folders for
TauDEM 5.2 not to work on other files by accident.

* Another reason is that I'm not sure I can be a maintainer in a long
  run. But it definitely worth giving a try to set things up once design
  decisions settle.

-- 
Mikhail