FYI. As many of you know, the DebianGIS project is packaging a large number of Open Source spatial apps for use within the Debian Linux distribution. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianGis IMO, Debian is one of the key Linux distributions. From memory around 50% of distributions are derived from it (including Ubuntu). It has a reputation for stability. As well as Debian, the Debian derivitives and other Linux distributions can also use the DebianGIS repositories. As such the DebianGIS packages that Frankie and the DebianGIS project members are preparing for Debian have relevance for a significant portion of the Linux community. From Frankie's email below it appears that Debian will soon be freezing packages in preparation for the next stable version of Debian due out later this year. I'm sure that the DebianGIS team would welcome help from other developers if you're able to spare the time. Bruce Bannerman ------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Francesco P. Lovergine <frankie@debian.org> To: pkg-grass-general@lists.alioth.debian.org Subject: [DebianGIS] Freezing is not so far in the future, aka Where 1.0 Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 20:45:19 +0200 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
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