Packaging GRASS 7
Hi all,
With the upcoming RC releases for GRASS 7 it's high time that we
consider it's inclusion in Debian and it's derivatives via official
packages.
The GRASS team maintains debian packaging on Launchpad [1] where they
having packing for both a grass70 and grass71 source package. One of the
questions for the Debian GIS team is to decide whether we want to follow
upstream in this regards or choose to stick to a single grass source
package.
Since GRASS has only a few reverse dependencies, I'm inclined to stick
to a single grass source package. I don't think upstream will maintain
the GRASS 6.4 after the release the GRASS 7.0, this is an assumption
though as I'm not aware of their release plans.
Initially I thought about keeping GRASS 6.4 and 7.0 separate to help
ease migration for both end users and ourselves with respect to the
reverse dependencies. But I've become more skeptical about the value of
keeping GRASS 6.4 after the release of 7.0. And I also suspect that the
Release Team will not accept multiple GRASS versions in a stable release.
Migrating from GRASS 6.4 to 7.0 and possibly even 7.1 during the stretch
development cycles seems doable due to the limited number of reverse
dependencies:
libgdal-grass
e00compr
epigrass
qgis-plugin-grass
GDAL 1.11.0 improved support for GRASS 7, so that's unlikely to cause
problems. e00compr is not actively developed upstream, so I suspect that
may cause problems with GRASS 7. epigrass only suggests grass, and
doesn't build depend on it. I've heard about the QGIS GRASS plugin not
supporting GRASS 7 yet, but that's unlikely to remain the case after the
release of 7.0.
The OSGeo Live team already includes the grass70 packages, but the issue
tracking it [2] doesn't have any information about breakage yet.
The upcoming GRASS 7 release is a good opportunity to cleanup the grass
package, address its lintian issues, and squash it's relatively many
outstanding bugs.
I suggest we keep GRASS 6.4 in unstable until we handled all issues with
the move to 7.0, and start packaging 7.0 for experimental.
I'd like to hear your thoughts about the future of the grass package,
and the move from 6.4 to 7.0.
Kind Regards,
Bas
[1] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~grass/grass/grass70_release_debian/files
[2] http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/1433
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