[QGIS-Developer] Ubuntu Package Releases and GDAL Dependancies

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 01/09/2018 06:28 AM, Jeremy Palmer wrote:
> I've been taking a close look at a way to install QGIS with >= GDAL 2 on
> 64bit Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 for production desktops.
> 
> It's not possible to install QGIS using the https://qgis.org/debian package
> archive as the ubuntu  14.04 archives only supports GDAL 1.10.1 and 16.04
> only supports GDAL 1.11.3.
> 
> With https://qgis.org/ubuntugis it is possible to install QGIS with >= GDAL
> 2.2 as this archive requires ubuntugis-unstable which currently supports
> GDAL 2.2.2.
> 
> The issue I have is I'm reluctant to use ubuntugis-unstable for production
> use. I would rather use ubuntugis-stable. However this archive only
> supports GDAL 2.1 and doesn't provide the minimum dependency of GDAL 2.2.2
> for https://qgis.org/ubuntugis requires.
> 
> I was wondering why ubuntugis stable isn't used as the debian archive for
> https://qgis.org/ubuntugis and ubuntugis-unstable is only used for the
> development (e.g 2.99) nightly builds? This makes more sense to me.

You should have a look at UbuntuGIS development to see that it is mostly
the work of one person now. Packages are updated for OSGeo-Live and
copied to ubuntugis-unstable, after a while (no policy or guidelines)
the packages from ubuntugis-unstable get copied to ubuntugis-stable.
This generally happens during an Ubuntu releases lifecycle, not ideal
for production systems.

For production systems one should not rely on 3rd party repositories,
other than the one the company maintains itself where it does all the
integration work.

> I've also noted that the 2.18 binaries produced for the 14.04 and 16.04
> packaging has inconsistent dependency requirements. e.g 2.18.15 14.04
> 64bit :
> 
> qgis - gdal-abi-2-2-2, libgdal20 (>= 1.8.0)
> qgis-providers = libgdal20 (>= 2.2.0)
> qgis-server - libgdal20 (>= 1.8.0)
> libqgis-dev - libgdal-dev (>= 1.10.1-0~)
> libqgis-core - libgdal20 (>= 2.2.0)
> libqgis-app2 libgdal20 (>= 2.0.1)

The version requirement for libgdal20 are determined based on which
symbols the code in the dependent package uses, qgis & qgis-servers
don't use any symbols introduced after GDAL 1.8.0, libqgis-dev does but
no symbols introduced after GDAL 1.10.1, etc.

Kind Regards,

Bas