[Ubuntu] My actions after the IRC meeting (Was: Reminder and Agenta for IRC meeting)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Kai,

On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 04:51:52PM -0600, Kai Krueger wrote:
> On 09/17/2013 11:24 AM, Andreas Tille wrote:
> [...]
> > 4. Update osm2pgsql
> > -------------------
> > 
> > "apmon" (whoever this nick might belong to)
> 
> That would be me.

:-)

> I am currently the upstream maintainer of osm2pgsql and mod_tile /
> renderd and I would like to see improved packaging of them in the
> various distributions. I have in the past created my own packages in a
> Ubuntu PPA ( https://launchpad.net/~kakrueger/+archive/openstreetmap )
> which are currently one of the recommended ways to get the OSM tile
> rendering stack up and running and are linked from e.g switch2osm.org

I think it would be a really good idea to move this to official Debian /
Ubuntu via the according teams.  I'm quite new to Debian Gis because I'm
somehow "originated" in Debian Med but if I can guess from this
experience you are getting valuable help in these teams.  I'm missing
somehow some kind of policy document as we have it in Debian Med[1]
which is intended to help newcomers to take the first hurdles.  It seems
to make sense to create such a document for Debian Gis as well.  We
derived it from Debian Perl policy in some distant past.  So it might
make sense to finde a reasonable template from one of these documents
and than add the Debian Gis specifics.

> I.d much prefer if all of the necessary packages could be in the
> official package repositories and the recommendation can be to use those
> instead of PPAs.

+1

> So I'd like to try and make upstream as compatible as possible with the
> packaging efforts to ensure it is easy to keep these packages up-to-date.
> 
> However, at the moment I am not too familiar with the various policy and
> packaging requirements of Debian, and thus what would be most useful to
> make it trivial to keep the packages up-to-date.

May be you can have a look at [1] how to create an Alioth account which
has some valuable hints and links about this.  I have no idea whether
somebody in Debian Gis is doing something like I'm doing in Debian Med
to teach newcomers and helping them to start.  It is called "Mentoring
of the Month" (MoM)[2] and I had a video recorded talk at DebConf[3]
which explains the idea in detail.  Since currently there is no student
in Debian Med we might agree upon this in mid-October once I'm back from
vacation.

Kind regards

      Andreas.

[1] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/debconf13/webm-high/987_How_to_attract_new_developers_for_your_team.webm

-- 
http://fam-tille.de