[DebianGIS-dev] maps / coastline files within Debian

[Alastair McKinstry]

Hi,

I am working on some packages for Debian Meteorology 
(http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Meteorology):
magics++ , a plotting / graphics library / scripting system , and 
zyGrib, a GRIB (met. format) file viewer.
They both include some coastline maps from "gshhs"  
(http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/shorelines/gshhs.html),
the "Global Self-Consistent Heirarchical High-Resolution Shoreline 
database. This data is GPL'd,
created by the same people as "gmt".

zyGrib contains 23M of "low-res" maps, with an additional package of 101 
MB optional high-res maps.
magics++ has 21 MB in one file from this set; the files are in their own 
.b format. It makes sense to build these
files into their own shared package.

Now, it appears that these are the same data files in 'gmt' (Generic 
Mapping Tools) a lower-res version of the coast files are provided
in netCDF format in gmt-coast-low (5.5 MB worth). There was a 
higher-resolution package gmt-coast-high, but this was removed as
it took up too much space in Debian.

Does anyone know this code? It appears as though the gmt-coast-low is 
not sufficient for zyGrib and magics++,
and I'm not familiar with the history of "gmt" beyond the README.  Any 
ideas or recommendations as to how to proceed?

Regards
Alastair McKinstry