[DebianGIS] Freezing is not so far in the future, aka Where 1.0
Hi all
This message is a very informal and incomplete report about
our Status of the Map.
I would remind that package freezing is roughly expected in mid July.
People is warmly invited to think ASAP what upstream versions should go into
Lenny. Two months are not a so long time in the future and please
consider that our packages have a not so large user base for testing.
Many packages also have a quite long dependencies chain which could
slow down britney job. So be very careful and defensive in uploading
new versions.
There will be the possibility of uploading GDAL 1.5.2 (probably), hdf5 1.6.7 and
hdf4 4.2r1 for lenny. IMHO grass is already frozen (but for a probable
6.3.0 preview version to be uploaded in parallel with the stable
release). It would be nice to know if we have already to consider
frozen PostGis and Mapserver, but for some minor adjustment.
If people had to point patches for known upstream issues it would
be great.
A big lack is Qgis which requires more love of what I'm
able to dedicate. Some volunteers headed to manage it better
for a 0.10.0 release, but it's still missing. About that, consider
that the ftpmasters' job will be specifically accurate, so
a damn good job need to be done to solve its main issues.
I worked a bit on uDig and gvSig: they both at the same time require
too much work in order to have them properly packaged (they lacks a
proper multi-user installer for instance and there are also a few
license issue to be considered), and they are also easily
installable as they are by the casual user starting from the upstream
provided installers, so probably they should not be on the top
of our todo lists.
Saga Gis is easily buildable, but I had big problems in using it
also for working with quite easy shape and geotiff files.
It seems quite far from being a mature product. I would add
that among interesting experimental stuff, as already done with Ossim
which at least starts to have a shape. But still not ready for main.
I would hope other people would summarize status of OSM-related
packages.
Finally, we are still lacking human resources. Which is not a news
for this project, but I can see the same problems in other
teams, such as the Tcl/Tk group, sigh. We are in a bit better status
than one year ago anyway. I would prefer that some folks who
anyway do some packaging efforts out there in the GIS world would
collaborate here. But hey, we are in a free world and I know
that Debian standars are quite high and demanding ...
Happy gis-hacking to all
--
Francesco P. Lovergine
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