[DebianGIS] gdal team maintenace process
I am back from vacation and ready to help out with the recent GDAL discussions. I agree past discussion that GDAL in Debian is lacking effective support. Here are some suggestions that I think will help our new team maintenance of GDAL work more efficiently.
1. We as a team need to establish which GDAL 1.3.1 packages sources we will work from. There are currently two versions of GDAL 1.3.1 debian packages floating around (one on debianGIS repo and another on mentors.debian.net). We should evaluate each of these package sources and select the one that best conforms to Debian Policy. To work efficiently as a team we need to maintain one central gdal package in debianGIS repository so as to consolidate our efforts.
2. We should establish a semi-official list of DebainGIS GDAL team members and who are seriously willing to contribute some of their time and who could be considered accountable for problems and successes of GDAL packages. In my opinion the "team" should be a small group (of two or three at most) people willing to: take responsibility for watching for new GDAL versions, respond to bugs.debian.org bug reports in a timely manner, communicate with and delegate tasks to others on the Debian community who test or contribute patches to the GDAL package.
Our concept of team maintenance is too nebulous right now. When new versions or problems arise in GDAL currently our debianGIS team response is to wait and hope that one of our excellent group of contributors will eventually find time. This is not proactive and often results in forked versions of our package. Appointing a small team will allow us to delegate tasks and proactively develop our GDAL packages.
I suggest that maybe Steve Halasz and I (Jon Saints) could be initial members of this team, but this is something for the list to decide. And anyone willing to contribute time and effort please add your name to this list. I am not trying to be exclusive here, we will still be open to all community contributions, my aim is only to focus our development more.
3. We need to establish and official sponsor and an alternate who will be willing to regularly sponsor debianGIS verisions of GDAL and move them into debian unstable once DebianGIS packages have been tested and receive a vote of confidence from enough testers on the debianGIS mailing list.
<!-- @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> <!-- @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } -->I think this could be Petter Reinholdtsen (primary sponsor) and Francesco P. Lovergine (alternate sponsor).
These are just my ideas, I am open for all comments.
I would like to aim for a version of GDAL 1.3.1 ready for debian unstable within a week or so.
Good to be back,
Jon
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