[Ubuntu] Proposal - Cleaning up dependencies/repos

[pcreso at pcreso.com]

Everyone seems to have their own stack of GIS apps, and I fully agree that the dependencies between versions can be a problem.

I use PostGIS/QGIS/mapserver/geos/gdal/GMT, occasionally SAGA GIS, and getting a reasonably recent version of all of these to coexist is tricky. UbuntuGIS is easily the best repository I have come across (OpenSUSE:Geo used to be better, but no longer - at least IMHO - which is why I'm now in this forum :-).

I'd be nervous about one stack of tools from the repository driving the whole thing, so while I sympathise with Alex's concerns, and support finding a solution to minimise "dependency hell", focussing on QGIS/GDAL/Spatialite is something I'd be concerned about.

For example, we have recently had to compile both GMT and Postgis from source on Ubuntu 10.04 to get around dependency problems (but we were using Postgres v9 - so that is understandable), but I'd sooner see Postgis issues resolved than spatialite :-)

Cheers,

  Brent Wood


--- On Thu, 11/25/10, Alan Boudreault <aboudreault at mapgears.com> wrote:

From: Alan Boudreault <aboudreault at mapgears.com>
Subject: Re: [Ubuntu] Proposal - Cleaning up dependencies/repos
To: ubuntu at lists.osgeo.org, tech at wildintellect.com
Date: Thursday, November 25, 2010, 6:37 AM



#yiv1480557085 p, #yiv1480557085 li {white-space:pre-wrap;}
I agree that RCs (perhaps excepting grass) should stay in unstable. However, it would be nice to know if there are real issues in qgis/geodjango with spatialite 2.4 rc2 before rebuilding packages in the stable ppa. Do you think you could test that? I'm also uncertain if it's a good thing to downgrade the spatialite package in the repo. But if there are issues, we'll do it. In the future, we will avoid to put RCs in stable.

About gpsprune, have added ubuntugis unstable PPA as dependency in your ppa? If not, it would be useful to recompile your gpsprune package with the ubuntugis dependencies and retest it. (btw, I have absolutely what gpsprune is and what its dependencies are)

Thanks
Alan

On November 23, 2010 05:11:05 pm Alex Mandel wrote:
> So I ran into an interesting quagmire of dependencies.
> The moral of the story, I would like to propose that RC candidates of
> apps stay in "unstable" and not trickle into "stable" and maybe not even
> into "testing" (this could be a little looser).
> 
> Particularly the issue I ran into is that spatialite 2.3.1 isn't in the
> repos at all, Lucid has 2.3.0 but it seems stuck on geos 3.1.0 which is
> making my QGIS crash. I would upgrade to spatialite 2.4 RC but I'm not
> sure that plays nice with GeoDjango yet.
> 
> So under my idea
> Stable would have 2.3.0 or 2.3.1, QGIS 1.5(Could be upgraded after we
> know 1.6 is safe)
> Testing would also have 2.3.1, QGIS 1.6
> Unstable would have 2.4 RC x
> 
> That way in testing there would be a nice reliable set of QGIS, gdal,
> spatialite etc that are known to be fairly good and unstable would have
> more cutting edge stuff. I realize maverick included spatialite 2.4RC
> and think that may have actually been a mistake since the author admits
> it's a bit buggy (not to say 2.3.x series doesn't have it's issues). But
> more importantly some underlying changes could cause issues for QGIS,
> GeoDjango etc. In summary having some slightly older version no longer
> available in Debian or Ubuntu might actually be a + to the everyday user
> if the distro jumps the gun on an app(in stable of course).
> 
> This needs a little fine tuning obviously since GRASS tends to have
> really long release cycles and maybe could be summed as the "testing"
> ppa has the last known stable release.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> Thanks,
> Alex
> 
> PS: I'm more than willing to help package, just still new at it. Looks
> like gpsprune for Lucid worked and I would love to have that copied to
> ubuntugis.
> _______________________________________________
> UbuntuGIS mailing list
> Ubuntu at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu
> http://trac.osgeo.org/ubuntugis/wiki

-- 
Alan Boudreault
Mapgears
http://www.mapgears.com
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