[Ubuntu] Google Summer of Code Satus

[Jerome Villeneuve Larouche]

Hello,

As most of you know, I've been working on UbuntuGIS under the GSoC 
program, it's been going pretty well, but maybe not enough. I'm 
currently at week 11 out of 13 and there is still many things to be done.
This email is to make a small report of what I've done and what needs to 
be done next.

At week 11:
---------------
What is done:

  * All package in UbuntuGIS for Lucid, Precise, Quantal and Raring are 
updated to their latest version.
  * New LibLAS package with python binding (no LASzip)
  * New marble-qt package, install Marble without the KDE deps.
  * Fixed the bugs caused by the libgdal1h update.
  * Added the new libgeotiff package (1.4.0)
  * Updated the libgdal-ecw-src pacakge to compile with the new ECW 5.0 
SDK (there's still an issue with this one)

Issues:

  * The many issues caused by the libgdal1h seem to be fixed.
  * Same thing with the issues caused by the new package name in Postgis.
  * There is currently a problem with the new Libgdal-ecw-src package 
when trying to use Python-gdal and ECW support,I'm currently working on 
it, but if you have any idea what may cause the undefined symbol error, 
please post in this ticket http://trac.osgeo.org/ubuntugis/ticket/34

Java Packaging:

  * Looked into packaging Geotools, but it doesn't seem possible to do 
it in the time frame I have.
  * Tried to package the latest version of Osmosis to learn a bit more 
about Java Packages but I ran into problem while trying to compile it 
and its new build method doesn't seem to be supported for package, so I 
moved on.

Suggestions (Improvement for UbuntuGIS):

  * Make a new SAGA package.
  * Create a new plugin similar to the ECW, but for Oracle support for 
Mapserver and GDAL, will start working on it soon.

Other:

  * Create a new repository in Debian for people who don't want to use 
Unstable but still need the latest GIS softwares.
  * Complete new documentation for UbuntuGIS.