[SAC] Motion: Provide SVN and Trac services to the UbuntuGIS project

[Frank Warmerdam]

Jason Birch wrote:
>> It was seldom appropriate for use in Debian at the point I released a GDAL
>> release (since I was not a savvy Debian person) and when the DebianGIS
>> folks fixed things up it was not all that convenient for them to get the
>> changes back into GDAL upstream.
> 
> Were they involved in the project (did they have commit rights to your
> repository) or were they relying on the project to take their changes and
> re-integrate them?

Jason,

The DebianGIS package maintainers were not GDAL commiters, though currently
Frankie is very good about passing back suggested fixes to GDAL.  He has
never (in my recollection) expressed an interest in maintaining debian
stuff inside GDAL itself.

Note that the Debian folks are often driven loosely by the Debian release
cycle, and may not be particularly interested in refining GDAL for Debian
packaging while a major GDAL release is in Beta.

I'm not saying it couldn't work.  I'm saying that it didn't work and
that it may not be realistic to expect tight integration between packaging
communities like DebianGIS and all the packages they incorporate.

>> I would note that OSGeo4W is relatively fine grained packaging - not a
>> monolithic installer.
> 
> My understanding was that OSGeo4W was basically a replacement for "apt" but
> OSGeo-specific and on a Windows platform.  Isn't the intention that someone
> download OSGeo4W (which then allows them to choose which features they wish
> to install)?

Yes, all the above is true, but that does not make it any more monolithic
than apt.  Note that when you download the OSGeo4W installer you do not
actually get all the packages at the same time.  They are downloaded
when you request them, and the package list is updated on an ongoing
basis.

Contrast that with FWTools for instance, which I do consider monolithic.
Everything you could install is in the download, and there is no
splitting of effort amoung many packages.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent