Anyone wanting to contribute to gdal 2 in debian: a useful thing that one can try (it has been on my todolist for long) is trying to create a package for ubuntu precise. You probably wonder why, but many projects use travis-ci for continuous integration tests, and many use the ubuntugis unstable ppa for that. If we set up this (or a seperate ppa) with gdal 2 more upstream projects will test/fix gdal2 builds. Kind Regards, Johan