[DebianGIS] ITP(?) rtklib: Real Time Kinematic and other advanced GPS positioning techniques
Hi,
[short summary:
http://people.debian.org/~mpalmer/debian-mentors_FAQ.html instructs me
to check the license of a package before filing an ITP bug. I'm afraid
that checking the licensing might take time and want make sure no
duplication of work happens during that time.]
after some trial and error I recently got pretty promising results [1]
using two receivers and Tomoji Takasu's rtklib 2.4.0 [2] for post
procesing the raw GPS data.
I created a Debian package [3] for my own use as I usually do when I
want to run the software on multiple computers but was still unsure if
it could be useful for Debian since
1) I was not sure rtklib really provided an improvement (maybe some
averaging just causes the scatter plot to be so tight?) and
since
2) I was not sure if the package was really DFSG-free.
Today I was able to trace the outlines of an aerial imagery marker
and clearly see it in the trace:
http://lindi.iki.fi/lindi/gps/experiment/4/screenshot4.png
Units are meters in UTM coordinate system. This convinced me that
rtklib is useful. You can see the marker in real life in
http://lindi.iki.fi/lindi/gps/experiment/4/marker1.jpg
Now to the second point. As I explained in
http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/foss-gps/2010-August/000420.html
the upstream zip file (no tarballs) is somewhat tricky:
"The source package does not include the following files since I feel
they do not meet the DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines):
bin/wget.exe
bin/gzip.exe
bin/crx2rnx.exe
bin/mkl_lapack.dll
bin/rtkpost.exe
bin/convbin.exe
bin/pos2kml.exe
bin/rtkpost_mkl.exe
bin/libguide40.dll
bin/MSVCR71.DLL
bin/teqc.exe
bin/mkl_def.dll
bin/mkl_p4p.dll
bin/rtkconv.exe
bin/rnx2rtkp.exe
bin/strsvr.exe
bin/srctblbrows.exe
bin/rtknavi.exe
bin/rtkplot.exe
mkl/mklib.bat
mkl/include/mkl_blas.h
mkl/include/mkl_types.h
mkl/include/mkl_lapack32.h
mkl/include/mkl_lapack.h
mkl/include/mkl_lapack64.h
mkl/mkl_lapack.lib
mkl/mkl_p4p.lib"
and there are still things to do:
"1) Carefuly license review. The source package mentions "GPLv3" only
in one place and does not contain a copy of the license itself. I need
to make sure that this license really applies to all the files.
2) Support DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="nostrip debug noopt" properly so that it
is possible to build the package with debugging symbols. This probably
requires changes to the Makefiles so that I can instruct them to add
"-g" when needed.
3) Enable testsuite. I found commands to run tests but I did not find
the expected output to compare against.
4) Write better manual pages. They are currently autogenerated using
help2man and are bit odd.
5) Get rid of rtklib- prefix for binaries? Currently the binaries are
called
rtklib-convbin rtklib-pos2kml rtklib-rnx2rtkp rtklib-rtkrcv rtklib-str2str
since I was initially afraid names like "convbin" could be too generic."
So, is it too early to file an ITP bug?
Is somebody already working on this package?
Do you feel this package is something worth packaging at all?
Any other comments? :-)
[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/foss-gps/2010-August/000407.html
[2] http://gpspp.sakura.ne.jp/rtklib/rtklib.htm
[3] http://lindi.iki.fi/lindi/debian/pool/main/r/rtklib/rtklib_2.4.0+dfsg1-0lindi2.dsc
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