Re: Packaging policy for shapefiles

[Hamish <hamish_b@yahoo.com>]

David wrote:
> I intend to package some shapefiles available from NaturalEarth [0] (they
> mostly are public domain) and from OpenStreetMap (which are under CC-BY-SA,
> atm), which might come handy both as package Recommends, and as stand-alone
> shapefiles (for use with things like qgis and grass, or even proprietary
> applications one might use)

wrt Natural Earth, see the OSGeo LiveDVD install script:
  http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/browser/livedvd/gisvm/trunk/bin/load_gisdata.sh

as a low priority we've wanted to put most of what
we install into .debs so would benefit from this
packaging effort.


wrt OSM, which layers exactly?
I ask because there are longstanding wishes to merge or settle on the
two main coastline formats used by the gmt, opencpn, xtide, and a few
other packages. check the archives of this list for more.


Tony:
> What would be nice about data.debian.org (or similar) would be that the
> data files could be volatile - i.e. not tied to a specific release
> throughout the release cycle.

I'm not entirely convinced that is a wise idea.

fwiw existing DebianGIS webspace exists:
  http://pkg-grass.alioth.debian.org/
but AFAIK only the tarballs/ dir is used right now, the root redirects
to our wiki page.


see also the gmt-coast-low package which installs a script to download a
hi-res coastline from the internet. (which I would
propose to just package as gmt-coast-full or so
these days as disk space is cheap and the GSHHS
dataset size has remained more or less static)


regards,
Hamish